Consul Iurasov and Professor Korotniov invited Chekhov to winter once again in Nice, but The Cherry Orchard detained him. In any case, he was barely well enough to venture into the street, let alone cross Europe. Just before the New Year, Gorky, Leonid Andreev, and their lawyers drafted a letter to Adolf Marx, urging him to give Chekhov a new contract for his forthcoming twenty-fifth jubilee. Anton told them to desist.
In Petersburg Evgenia was forgetting her worries with Misha's family, but on 7 January Anton ordered her back: 'You've outstayed your welcome, it's time you came to Moscow. Firstly we all miss you,
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and secondly we need to discuss Yalta.' There appeared to be nothing to discuss, but a crucial day was approaching, 17 January, Anton's forty-fourth name day, the day set for The Cherry Orchard's first performance.
EIGHTY-TWO
Ô
Last Farewells January-July 1904 :? 'THINGS WERE RESTLESS, something ominous hung in the air. It was no time of joy, that evening of 17 January 1904,' Olga recalled in 1929. Few plays had been so well rehearsed as The Cherry Orchard. The theatre was packed, and behind many seats sickly looking spectators stood. These 'angels' were said to be consumptives from Yalta, a memento mori to the celebrities in the stalls and boxes: Rachmaninov, Andrei Bely, Gorky, Chaliapin and almost all Chekhov's Moscow friends. Anton was not in the theatre for the first three acts. He was recovering after a night at the opera, listening to Chaliapin sing. The Cherry Orchardwas having a muted reception. Nemirovich-Danchenko sent a carriage with a disingenuous message: 'Couldn't you come for the third interval, though you probably won't get curtain calls now?'
During the third interval Anton was duly brought on to the stage. Into the centre of a half-circle of distinguished academics, journalists and actors, to loud applause, walked a living corpse, hunched, pale and emaciated. Stanislavsky was aghast. A voice from the stalls cried out, 'Sit down!' There was no chair. Speeches began. Professor Vese-lovsky spoke: Anton recalled his hero Gaev addressing a bookcase on its 1 ooth anniversary. He muttered 'Bookcase!' and everyone sniggered. Speeches and telegrams were read until Anton, his eyes like a hunted animal's, was led off to lie on a dressing-room divan. Gorky chased out everyone except the young actor Kachalov who, made up as Trofimov, looked as moribund as Anton. Half an hour later, the play over, the audience too subdued by the third interval to applaud loudly, Anton went to sup with the actors. He was showered with speeches and given presents of antique furniture: he detested it. What he really wanted, he told Stanislavsky, was a new mouse trap. The police charged the theatre for holding an 'unauthorized public gathering'.
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Tickets were readily available for the next performances of The Cherry Orchard. A black comedy was ill attuned to the public's mood of Jingoism on the eve of the Russo-Japanese war, which was declared on 24 January 1904. Three days later, the Japanese sank the Russian Pacific fleet at Port Arthur. In a mournful, even apocalyptic mood, reviewers tended to dismiss the play as a political allegory about gentry overthrown by commoners. In Petersburg by the end of Lent, The Cherry Orchard was playing to half-empty houses. Gorky set up the text, but his almanac Knowledge ran into the sands of censorship. Time was needed for Russia's mood to turn elegiac and for Nemirovich-Danchenko to find the necessary 'lace-like' touch to make the play a success in the even more turbulent year that was to come.
Anton wanted to flee to the Riviera or the Crimea. The stairs to the Moscow apartment were 'real agony'. Jubilee celebrations for his writing career had brought many a past acquaintance out of the woodwork. Demands on his sympathy were unbearable. Olga's nephew, Liova, had tuberculosis of the spine: the prognosis was paralysis or death. The eldest Golden sister, Anastasia, married to the dramatist Pushkariov, her beauty, wealth and health all gone, begged for a pension. Lidia Avilova wanted advice on charity for wounded soldiers. The Gurzuf schoolteacher asked Anton to make the church remarry him to his late wife's sister. Kleopatra Karatygina wanted money to send her consumptive brother to a sanatorium.
Anton needed an undemanding occupation. Goltsev made him Russian Thought's literary editor and fed him manuscripts to sort out. Anton abandoned the brilliant opening pages of two stories he would never finish, 'The Cripple' and 'Disturbing the Balance', and set willingly to skimming over, and even annotating, beginners' prose. On 14 February 1904, as Evgenia headed for the Crimea, Olga took Anton to Tsaritsyno, fifteen miles south of Moscow, to look at a dacha. The area had an unhealthy reputation, but the house was built for winter living. At Tsaritsyno there had been a derailment and Anton had to return in a freezing cab. Altshuller was appalled when he heard that this had happened.
The next day Anton and Schnap took the Crimean express. At Sevastopol he was met by Evgenia's maid Nastia - Evgenia had gone ahead overland - and they sailed to Yalta. Playing with the yard dogs and sleeping with Evgenia, the dog settled back into Yalta life better
JANUARY-JULY I904
than his master. The house was so cold that visitors kept their fur coats on. Anton found undressing laborious; the bed was hard and cold; Nastia's soup was 'like dishwater, the pancakes as cold as ice'. He was too ill to travel abroad and it was too expensive to travel anyway - war had hit the Russian rouble. The solitary tame crane had belatedly migrated south. There was no congenial company: Bunin, now 'all parchment and sourness', as Anton described him, was in Moscow with Masha and Olga. The Cherry Orchard had followed Anton into the provinces: it was being performed in Rostov-on-Don, then in Taganrog (to frenzied acclaim) and on 10 April in Yalta, but so badly that Anton walked out.
Olga, with Vania's help, went on inspecting houses near Moscow, though winter was nearly over and she knew it was pointless. The local climate, the vendor's price, or the cost of installing a lavatory aborted every sale. Olga had more success in provoking Maria Andreeva to resign from the company. Stanislavsky accepted her resignation,74 much to Andreeva's distress and Olga's delight: She swore at everybody, including me… Nobody regrets her departure, in the management, that is, I don't know about the actors. What will come of it! I hope there is no split in the theatre. I still don't know what to do, Gorky is involved, there is no argument about that.75 Now Olga had only one enemy in the theatre, Nemirovich-Danchenko's wife, who, as Baroness Korf by birth, was unshakeable. Olga had, however, rivals outside. In Moscow Komissarzhevskaia was wildly acclaimed as Nora in The Doll's House at the Ermitage theatre. Olga declared that she ought to be ashamed of herself, her repertoire and her company. Worse, after Komissarzhevskaia's company came one led by Lidia Iavorskaia whose person, Olga claimed, 'gave everyone the horrors'. Olga was seriously frightened when her uncles, Karl the doctor, Sasha the captain, were despatched to the Manchurian front, and her brother Kostia was sent to extend the Trans-Siberian railway to the war zone. In Moscow, Dr Strauch died of a liver disease: Olga lost her gynaecologist and ally in her fight to keep Anton in Moscow. Anton was less affected by the war. His nephew Nikolai was conscripted and Lazarevsky, his most persistent visitor, was drafted to Vladivostok. Olga sent Anton soap, despite Altshuller's ban on wash
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ing (for fear of Anton chilling his lungs). Although Altshuller visited frequently, offering company rather than treatment, Anton felt lonely, in need of something to do, but too weak to do much. He advised Olga's distraught sister-in-law Lulu about her son's tuberculosis, collected for the Yavuzlar sanatorium and posted manuscripts to Goltsev and even their authors. Aleksandr, who sensed a last chance, came to stay for March, with Natalia (whom Anton had not met for seven years), the twelve-year-old Misha and their dachshund. Anton told Olga: 'Aleksandr is sober, kind, interesting. Generally promising. And there is hope that he won't be a drunk again, though there is no guarantee.' Masha arrived on 19 March, followed by Vania at Easter, for a family reunion which they suspected might be their last. Only Misha was missing, opening station bookstalls for Suvorin in the Caucasus.