This playful gift for absurdly mixing trivial and serious speech was to lead to two elements that mark out Chekhov's mature drama: inconsequential conversation acting as a counterpoint to tragic utterances, and a plot which hangs on a character who has died before the action starts and about whom we shall never be told the truth. The corpse of Tatiana Repina haunts Chekhov's gift to Suvorin, just as the professor's first wife haunts Uncle Vania, Colonel Prozorov the Three Sisters, or Ranevskaia's drowned son The Cherry Orchard.
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A Death at Luka March-June 1889 CHEKHOV TOOK UP his novel. He also made a mysterious trip to Kharkov, ostensibly to look at a ranch for Suvorin, but perhaps in response to Lily Markova's (now Sakharova) invitation. The trip was, to judge by the hellish aura around Kharkov in his fiction, disagreeable. When Anton returned to Moscow on 15 March 1889, the horse-trams had stopped and blizzards had piled snowdrifts five feet high in front of the house. His mother showed him a postcard from Kolia: 11 March 1889… Dear Mama, Illness has prevented me from visiting you. Two weeks ago I caught a bad chilclass="underline" I was shaking with fever and my side was hurting desperately. But now, thanks to quinine and various ointments I am better and hasten to work to make up for lost time…43 ÒÂ had struck Kolia's intestines. Anton diagnosed typhoid as well. On 29 March Anton, unsure of himself, summoned Nikolai Obolon-sky again to Kolia's bedside, back at Anna Ipatieva-Golden's house: Anna told them that Kolia had not touched alcohol for two months. For ten days, longing to escape, Anton visited the feverish emaciated Kolia. It took four hours to cross Moscow's thawing snow to see him. Anton brought Kolia home. Kolia described his rescue to a Taganrog friend: My bromer sent me broth. Then on Easter Saturday a carriage was sent for me, they dressed me, and sent me to my mother and family. Almost nobody recognized me. They immediately put me to bed. At 2 a.m. on Easter Sunday everybody celebrates, shouting, noise, drinking wine, and I am lying out of the way, an outcast. The week after Easter there was a concilium with Karneevsky [Korneev?] and it was decided mat I should eat as much as possible, drink vodka, beer, wine, and eat ham, herring, caviar.44
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Anton could only muse about his unwritten novel, a work 'with all thoughts and hopes of good people, their norms and deviations, the framework being freedom'. Little freedom was in prospect. There was no money to take Kolia to a warm climate where he might rally, and he could not get a passport. Anton sought consolation in the stoic maxims of Marcus Aurelius, a book he marked heavily with his pencil.
Meanwhile the servants made merry. Pavel and Evgenia were giving their cook, Olga, away in marriage. In late February, at the betrothal, the kitchen had rung with the sound of the harmonica and stamping boots. On 14 April, while Kolia lay moribund upstairs, the wedding feast began. Anton did not feel festive. He invited Schechtel to take leave of Kolia, who was now able to stand, and sent Misha and their mother to prepare the arrival of patient and doctor in the Ukraine. After he had seen them off, Anton went to a meeting of the Dramatic Society and afterwards, he confided in a letter to Dr Obolonsky, looked at the dawn then went for a walk, then I was in a foul pub where I watched two crooks play an excellent game of billiards, then I went to the sordid places where I chatted with a mathematics student and musicians, then I returned home, drank some vodka, had breakfast and then (at 6 a.m.) went to bed, was woken up early and am now suffering. Posting that letter, Chekhov took Kolia to the station and, in a first-class sleeping car, made the journey to Sumy. For the first time in months Kolia slept and ate well. Masha followed a few days later with shoes, a string for the mandolin, and paper and frames for Kolia. Despite, or because of, Kolia's illness, many friends were invited down: Davydov, Barantsevich, the cellist Semashko, not to mention Vania. Suvorin proposed to call on his way to Austria and France. Anton told him: 'How I'd love to go now somewhere like Biarritz where music is playing and there are lots of women. Were it not for the artist, I'd chase after you.'
Aleksandr was not invited. Anton sternly told him that money was the only practical help. Aleksandr offered to marry Natalia - she would not risk pregnancy until she was married. Aleksandr became the first Russian male recorded buying a contraceptive. On a chit for Anton's eyes alone he wrote, on 5 May:
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MY it ê î i 11 in ÷' ê!•: ê i» ê ê Kngulfed by carnal lusts (after long abstinence) 1 bought in a chemists' a condon (or condom - the devil knows) for 35 kopecks. But as soon as I tried to put it on, it burst, probably from fear at the sight of my shaft. So I had no luck. I had to tame the flesh again.4'
Kolia was too weak to flee. By day he sat, or lay in a hammock, sunbathing in the orchard. He ate for four, but could not digest food and could hardly walk. He coughed incessantly and he quarrelled with his mother. Other people's deference to the dying made him more capricious. He was given creosote, ipecacuanha and menthol. Death cast a pall over the Psioclass="underline" the fishing and the songbirds lost their appeal. Anton tried to distract himself. He dreamed of Mile Emilie, the Suvorins' governess; he went to the Sumy theatre that Aleksandr had disrupted the previous year; he buried himself in work. He wrote the first act of The Wood Demon to an outline agreed with Suvorin: the core of this play, which eventually became Uncle Vania, is in the doctor-landowner who finds ecstasy in planting a birch tree, but there was little drama yet. The original plan was based on the Suvorins. The elderly professor, his young second wife, his daredevil son, two children called Boris and Nastia and a French governess called Mile Emilie are the Suvorin family transferred to Luka; the idealists and cranks who cross their path have aspects of the Lintvariovs and the Chekhovs. From the start, the material is unstageable, for it is as rich and broad as Middle-march. Suvorin would soon back out, but Chekhov persisted.
On 8 May Suvorin arrived for six days, on his way to more comfortable summer quarters. His arrival caused as much tension as that of the professor in Uncle Vania. The Lintvariovs, principled radicals, ostracized Suvorin (not that this stopped them from later asking Suvorin to send their village school free books). Anton was torn between two sets of friends. Worse, Kolia begged Suvorin for an advance for book cover designs. (Anton forbad Suvorin to pay him.) Meanwhile Kolia's mistress, Anna Ipatieva-Golden, at her wit's end near Moscow, was begging both Suvorin and Anton for financial help and a job.
Suvorin promised Anton 30 kopecks a line for the novel. He tactfully talked of buying a dacha nearby, but soon left for his villa in the Crimea. From there he discussed with Anton Paul Bourget's novel, The Disciple. Suvorin sympathized with Bourget's attacks on freeMARCH-JUNE 1889 thinkers as the godfathers of anarchy and murder. Russian readers, said Anton, liked Bourget only because French culture was better: 'a Russian writer lives in drainpipes, eating slugs, making love to sluts and laundresses, he knows no history, geography, natural sciences.' Anton wrote grimly to Leikin: he yearned for a time 'when I shall have my own corner, my own wife, not somebody else's… free of vanity and quarrels.'
Kolia also longed to be elsewhere. He wrote letters, mostly unposted, in all directions, begging for help. Kolia wanted to be back in his birthplace: I definitely need to visit Taganrog on business and, while I'm there, bathe in the sea… Get me a ticket from Kharkov to Taganrog and back… The class of ticket should correspond to my social position and take account of my weak state. In exchange I'll send you a woman's head painted in oils (very nicely done, I don't want to part with it)… I impatiently wait for a letter with 'Yes' and 'No' but with no 'ifs' etc.4* Kolia still had a sharp eye and steady hand. He wrote a calligraphic masterpiece to Dr Obolonsky, and illustrated it with a stout passenger in a first-class compartment and a train steaming across the steppes. Misha's letters to his cousin Georgi draw a veil over Kolia. He had to give up revisiting Taganrog: 'The poor man is so bad that really it would be awkward to leave him.' As Kolia declined, Misha ignored him. On 29 May 1889 he told Georgi: If you knew how good our evenings are, you'd drop everything, dacha, family, and come straight away to us… The smell of flowering lime trees, elder and jasmine and the scent of newly mown hay, scattered over our terrace for Trinity Day and the moon, like a pancake hanging over us… Next to me Masha is sitting, just back from Poltava, and a little further is nice Ivanenko. Both are reading. Through the open window come the conversations of Suvorin, who's come to stay with us, and… Anton… Semashko has taken a room with us for the whole summer, so all summer we shall be enjoying music. At the end of May the irrepressible actor Pavel Svobodin came, but could not bear the spectre - he too was dying of tuberculosis. He took a train back for Moscow, but Vania persuaded Svobodin to turn