When her lease expired, Olga moved to a flat with an electric lift, electric light and two lavatories, one of them working. Again she tantalized Anton with her vagueness about the address. Anton doubted that the lift would work. He had plans for the summer: he would go to Manchuria as a doctor and war correspondent. Nobody believed him, but he repeated his plan. He wrote to Uncle Sasha at the front, and supplied him with pipe tobacco.76 Olga dismissed Anton's plans as a childish whim. 'Where will you put me? Let's do some fishing instead.' She still hoped for a child. If Moskvin, who played the clumsy Epikhodov, could beget a son, 'When are you and I going to?' On 27 March 1904, Easter Saturday, she asked, 'Do you want a baby? Darling, I do too. I shall do my best.'
Anton had been sent proofs of The Cherry Orchard to check for Adolf Marx's edition. He lingered as long as he could, waiting for Knowledge to clear the censorship. When he returned the proofs to Marx in April, Marx published so fast that the Knowledge almanac was unsaleable, and Anton was badly embarrassed.
The Cherry Orchard opened in Petersburg on 2 April. Suvorin unleashed his curs again. Burenin in New Times declared: 'Chekhov is not just a weak playwright, but an almost weird one, rather banal and monotonous.' The company was nervous and Nemirovich-Danchenko's wife, Olga reported, put on a white dress and a green hat and went to church to light candles for luck, but the Petersburg audience, despite the hostile reviews, was very responsive. Olga had,
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however, uncomfortable encounters. Dr Jakobson, who had operated on her two years before, visited: 'he was a hellish bore'. She had already clashed with Lidia Iavorskaia: now was confronted with another Lesbian alliance between two of Anton's old loves: Maria Krestovskaia confessed to me, told me all her love for and disillusionment in Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik, who by the way has married a barrister, Polynov. Krestovskaia's voice shakes when she says that this Tanichka is an infinitely vicious creature.77 By mid April Aleksandr, Vania and Masha had left Anton in Yalta. The tame crane flew back for spring. Anton took bismuth for his guts and opium for the pains in his chest. (Altshuller issued heroin in case the pain became worse.) Nothing relieved his emphysema: 'How short of breath I am,' he groaned to Olga. His teeth were crumbling but Ostrovsky, the grubby Yalta dentist, was away. Anton was upset by the casualties on the Manchurian front: there would be no news of Uncle Sasha until May. Once spring had set in, Anton fled to Moscow. Olga's doctor Taube would examine him and send him abroad for treatment. He arrived on 3 May, so ill from the journey that he went straight to bed from the lift. He would never get up again for more than a few hours at a time. 'The Germans are coming to pay their respects,' Masha wrote to Evgenia, as Taube and his colleagues gathered. Their diagnosis was pleurisy and emaciation, their prescription enemas and yet another special diet. Anton was to consume brains, fish soup, rice, butter and cocoa with cream. Coffee was forbidden. Taube stopped Altshuller's boiled eggs and Spanish fly compresses. Too weak to sit, irritable and dejected, Anton conceded that he was in good hands: 'My advice, let Germans treat you… I have been tortured for twenty years!!!' he told his Yalta colleague Dr Sredin.
When Masha found out that Olga was planning to take Anton to Germany, she bitterly opposed her sister-in-law. She feared he would die there. In any case, Olga kept even Anton's kith and kin away from his bedside. Masha told Evgenia: 'I don't see him often - I am very afraid of Olga.'78 Olga and Masha had a violent quarrel and on 14 May Masha took leave of her brother and left Moscow for Yalta. Vania called daily and found out from the servants how Anton was. The only close friend to break through the cordon that Olga had
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erected around Anton was the indomitable Olga Kundasova; she had what she later told Suvorin was 'one of the most upsetting encounters [with Anton] a mortal could endure', so upsetting that she refused to reveal what had passed between them.
Anton's letters to Yalta calmed his mother and sister, but privately he colluded with Olga and Dr Taube. Three opiates set his mind at rest: morphine controlled his pain; opium, as a side effect, had finally staunched his diarrhoea; the heroin would ease anything worse. He knew that he could hope for a merciful death, like Levitan's, from heart failure, rather than from a haemorrhage. To die in Germany, far from a distraught family, in the arms of a skilled nurse like Olga, was his most attractive option. To one visitor Anton said, 'I am going away to croak'. Maddened by idleness, he tried to read Goltsev's manuscripts. He longed for coffee. 20 May brought a severe attack of pleurisy, but Dr Taube saved him. On 2 2 May Olga bought railway tickets for 2 June to Berlin and Badenweiler, a spa in the Black Forest, where Taube's colleague, Dr Schworer, practised. Hail and snow fell. In Yalta Masha was struggling with the cesspit. Olga begged her to write to Anton: he sat several times in the dining room and had supper there. Taube came. He says that the pleurisy is definitely better and that it is lack of air and motion that makes him so difficult. Tomorrow we'll let him have morning coffee. His guts are strong, so enemas can be given.
On 2 5 May Anton asked for his 4500 roubles from Knowledge for The Cherry Orchard, even though Gorky and Piatnitsky faced insolvency, because Adolf Marx had ignored Anton's pleas and pre-empted their publication of the play. The 4500 roubles arrived. Olga and Anton were ready to depart, when new agony struck, despite morphine. On 30 May, at dawn, Anton sent a note to Vishnevsky: 'Get me at once Wilson the masseur. I haven't slept all night, in agony from rheumatic pains; tell nobody, not even Taube.' Wilson came round immediately. The next day Anton went for a last carriage ride through Moscow's streets. He told Masha that he feared spinal tuberculosis. Olga also wrote to Masha: she now doubted that Anton would be able to travel. To relieve the muscle pain Taube administered aspirin and quinine and Olga injected arsenic. She could spare only a few minutes a day
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for the theatre. In Yalta Masha despaired and confided in Misha: 'My heart aches. Something is going to happen to him. The Yalta doctors say he would be better off staying in Yalta. Olga was very harsh to me and I could hardly see Antosha at all, I didn't dare go into his room.'80 Misha offered Masha cliches: 'Where there is hope, even a weak ray of it, not all is lost.' He hoped to bring his family to Yalta, while Anton was away, for a holiday.
Olga was impatient to leave: she was now injecting Anton with morphine. She blamed their new flat, where the heating boiler had broken down, for his rheumatic pains. On 3 June, as Gorky prepared to sue Adolf Marx for publishing Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard too early (the litigation would prove abortive), the Chekhovs left for Berlin.
In Berlin Olga's brother Volodia, now a singer, was waiting for them. So was Gorky's rejected wife, Ekaterina, with her children. Anton wrote to Masha, more gently than before, and thanked Altshuller. Here, at the Savoy, he could enjoy coffee. On 6/19 June Anton was treated to a carriage drive to the Zoo; he was introduced to Iollos, the correspondent for Sobolevsky's Russian Gazette -'interesting, agreeable and infinitely obliging,' Anton reported to Masha. Iollos was to be the Chekhovs' guardian angel in Germany. On 7/20 June a leading Berlin specialist, Professor Ewald, forewarned by Taube, visited the hotel. Ewald examined Anton, shrugged his shoulders and left the room without a word. 'I cannot forget Anton's smile, gentle, cooperative, somehow embarrassed and dismayed,' Olga recalled. Ewald was appalled at the idea of a dying man being shunted across Europe.