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Others doubted Anton's stamina. Sanin wrote to Lika on 14 August 1903: I hardly recognized the old Chekhov. It was very painful to look at the photo… But Knipper puts a brave face on it… then asked with embarrassment, 'Do you see anything wrong?' She's afraid to admit it to herself. Olga had the company of her brother Kostia: she had used her influence to get him transferred from the fever-ridden Persian border to Yalta, where he would assist the writer and engineer Garin-Mikhailovsky in building a grandiose coastal railway.
The absence of visitors was both a comfort and an exasperation, and Anton resumed his banter with Aleksandr. He wrote to him in a language Olga did not understand: 'Quousque tandem taces? Quousque tandem, frater, abutere patientia nostra?… Scribendum est. [How long are you going to be silent? How long, brother, are you going to try our patience… You must write.}' On 22 August 1903 Aleksandr responded with a warmth and robustness (in Latin and Greek) that seemed to have faded from their relationship fifteen years ago. Aleksandr pleaded for Masha and Olga's maid, the pregnant Masha Shakina: she could be expelled by Olga for abusing her 'cactus' with a married man whom I do not know… please intercede with my dear belle-sozur: would she not forgive the guilty girl?… Don't forget that a woman's shift is a curtain to the entrance into a public assembly where only members are allowed entry on condition that they remain standing.64 He was content with his sons, though Kolia had killed a dachshund, and Anton was too backward to chase the servant girls. Misha, his pride, was at twelve years old chatting in French and German, reading, despite Natalia's ban, his uncle's works, acting in amateur theatricals and chasing girls. As for Aleksandr's own potency: My life is pretty celibate, But I don't curse my luck. I fuck, although not well, but All the same, I fuck. By September, despite his painfully slow pace, Anton was sure of his
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plan for The Cherry Orchard. 1 Ic warned Stanislavsky's wife: 'At places it is even a farce; I fear I shall get it in the neck from Nemirovich-Danchenko.' Stanislavsky feared worse, telling his sister Zinaida on 7 September: 'I imagine it will be something impossible on the weirdness and vulgarity of life. I only fear that instead of a farce again we shall have a great big tragedy. Even now he thinks Three Sisters a very merry little piece.'65
Like The Seagull, The Cherry Orchard is subtitled 'comedy', even though it focuses on the destruction of a family and their illusions. The new play is crowded with reminiscences of earlier work and of personal traumas. The cherry trees that blossom in Act i recall those of his boyhood in Taganrog; the cherry trees axed in Act 4 recall the trees of Melikhovo, bought ten years earlier and now felled by Kon-shin. As in Anton's first play, feckless owners face an auction. The merchant Lopakhin, who urges them to sell land for cottages and then betrays them at the auction, has overtones of Gavriil Selivanov in Taganrog twenty-seven years before. The breaking string that punctuates Act 2 and Act 4 was first heard in the steppe stories of 1887. The seedy student Trofimov reminds us of the mentor, Sasha, in 'The Bride'; the feckless heroine marrying off her children to save the estate uses the tricks and phrases of the heroine in 'A Visit to Friends'. Anton's friends furnish the plot: Gaev and Ranevskaia lose the estate, as the Kiseliovs lost Babkino; Charlotta and the servants recall the motley entourage at Stanislavsky's Liubimovka.
An elegy for a lost world, estate and class, The Cherry Orchard nevertheless displays Anton's farcical invention at its richest. As in all Chekhovian comedy, however, the ending is grim, for the old retain power while the young are scattered to the winds. One factor alone is missing from the play: passion. Only the mistress of the house, Ranevskaia, who comes to Russia from her lover in France and then leaves again, is a sexual being. Nobody else expresses ardour, any more than Charlotta's rifle or Epikhodov's revolver ever fire. The doctor, increasingly inert in Chekhov's plays, fails to call. Death, in an ending which heralds Samuel Beckett, is banaclass="underline" a senile servant is forgotten in a locked house. Black humour, menace, wistfulness, the characters' doll-like quadrilles, the dominance of landscape over inhabitants; all these qualities make The Cherry Orchard the progenitor of modern drama from Artaud to Pinter. The engineer GarinMAY I903-JANUARY I904 Mikhailovsky saw the same incongruity between Anton's creative imagination and his doom as we see in the owners of The Cherry Orchard. He noted: 'Chekhov could hardly walk, noises came from his chest. But he seemed not to notice. He was interested in anything but illness:… Why are such precious contents locked up in such a frail vessel?'66
Olga was happy. Her compliant husband even let her cat into the house. They slept in separate rooms, but she came to Anton each morning after her dawn swim. On 19 September 1903 Olga left, with Schnap but widiout the cat, for Moscow, for the opening of the theatre season. She was hoping that she had conceived, and was confident that the play would follow her shortly. Anton bathed in the afterglow of her affection: he wrote to his 'little horse': 'I stroke you, groom you and feed you the best oats.' He was finishing The Cherry Orchard with pleasure - for once ending a play not with a gun, but an axe - but he was tormented by his cough and pains in his muscles. Altshuller forbade him to wash, applied Spanish fly and beseeched him not to go to Moscow. Anton would ignore this advice.
Masha returned to Moscow on 8 October and reported on Anton's progress under her care. The same day Olga exploded with jealousy to Anton: You are doing something about your health at last?! Why is that so difficult when I am there?… Probably Altshuller thinks I am wearing you out. He avoids talking to you about health when I am there. And when I leave, you begin to eat twice as much and Masha can do anything. Anton retorted that in Moscow he would live apart from her in furnished rooms. All he wanted was somewhere to sit in the theatre and a large lavatory; she could take a lover if she wanted. Diarrhoea, coughing and Altshuller's Spanish fly compress were making Anton's life unbearable. He complained to Olga: 'Once Masha left, the dinners naturally got worse; today for example I was served mutton which I am forbidden now, so I missed the main course… I eat eggs. Darling how hard it is to write a play.' Olga barely sympathized: her constipation was a match for Anton's diarrhoea. Masha had left a diet sheet in Yalta and Anton had written instructions for Mariushka and the
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I.OVK AND DliATII cook. One of them even jotted down an invalid's menu. They were to provide chicken and rice, cherry compote and blancmange; they blithely served beef, salt fish and potatoes. Anton went on hunger strike: on 15 October he was at last fed his diet.
The theatre rehearsed Julius Cesar with a heavy heart: Shakespeare was not their territory and Stanislavsky was a weak Brutus. When it opened, Julius C«esar was an unexpected success, but Anton still felt Stanislavsky's pressure to deliver The Cherry Orchard forthwith. On 14 October Anton packed up the new play and posted it to Moscow. He did what he said was absurd in Ibsen's Hedda Gabler: he sent the only copy. In Moscow Olga's visitors queued for permission to copy it or merely to glance. Gorky offered 4500 roubles to print it in his annual, Knowledge. Anton was dubious. Did his contract with Marx permit this? Was an annual a periodical? To get round the stipulations of Marx's contract with Anton, Gorky then promised 10 per cent of the proceeds to charity. (Despite his proletarian affiliations Gorky could behave like an aristocratic patron, for he was both Russia's best paid author and her most lavish commissioning editor.)