Anton began an affair with Kleopatra Karatygina. He took her, at her request, to see Les Huguenots, and prescribed her laxatives. Never did he bring her home or mention her. He also saw Glafira Panova, sometimes at the same address and time as Karatygina. She was clearly in his mind when he wrote to his editor, Evreinova, at The Northern Herald and mused about settling down 'with a nice little actress', or to Suvorin, for whom he drew Glafira's foot: 'I have known actresses who used to be ballerinas. Yesterday, before a stag night, I visited one such actress. She now despises ballet and looks down on it, but she can't get rid of her ballet body movements.'
Writing to Elena Lintvariova, Anton laughed at commitment: he signed himself 'A. Panov', to make fun of the rumours that he was to marry Glafira Panova. Kleopatra had agreed to humiliating conditions from her 'hellishly elegant writer': she was not to talk about the relationship in case Anton's mother and sister found out. Glafira had more pride, Kleopatra wrote: Glafira is with me… She asks me to tell you that if you grudge 20 kopecks, she takes on the travel costs… everything she would like to throw at our bosses will be thrown at you. Although, as she says, you will get what you deserve. In a word, you are going to be bawled out, she doesn't care that you're a fashionable writer and hellishly elegant. So if you wish to make up for your negligence towards her come and fetch me (if you're not embarrassed to drive down the street with an actress nobody wants)… You are ordered to come on Monday from 12 to 2. You are to have your hair curled and to put on a pink tie. Glafira left for Petersburg. Karatygina followed, clutching letters of recommendation and a copy of 'A Dreary Story' (a work she loathed for its portrayal of acting as moral perdition) inscribed 'For the famous actress K. K.'s bloody nerves, from her doctor'. About this time Anton confided in Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko that he had seduced a married woman and found her to be a virgin. (He also told the playwright that none of his affairs had lasted more than a year.)8 Anton hated being a 'fashionable writer': when an admirer in a
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restaurant started to recite a page by heart, he hissed at his companion, 'Take her away, I have a knuckle-duster in my pocket.' He felt ill all autumn: he told Dr Obolonsky that he had 'flu, Mesopotamian plague, sap, hydrophobia, impotence and all sorts of typhoids'. At his desk Anton was as paralysed as his professor of medicine. Instead of picking up the discarded novel, he encouraged Suvorin to send him unsolicited manuscripts to sift. Some of the beneficiaries were the young men and women who had accosted him in the Crimea. Ilia Gurliand had his story of a civil servant 'Gorshkov' polished and published. Anton took Elena Shavrova's next story, 'The Chorus Girl', about a girl seduced and abandoned by an actor who has another mistress. Anton recognized the protagonists. He told Suvorin: I've made the middle of'The Chorus Girl' the beginning, the beginning the middle, and I've put on a totally new ending. When the girl reads it she'll be horrified. And mummy will give her a thrashing for an immoral ending… The girl is trying to portray an operetta troupe that was singing this summer in Yalta… I used to know chorus girls. I remember a 19-year-old whom I treated and who flirted splendidly with her legs. For the first time I noted their skill at demonstrating the beauty of thighs without undressing or kicking up their legs… Chorus girls felt awful; they went hungry, whored out of poverty, it was hot, stifling, people smelt of sweat, like horses. If even an innocent girl had noticed and described that, then you can judge their position… On literature Chekhov sounded as embittered as his dying professor in 'A Dreary Story' or his neurotic The Wood Demon. On 27 December 1889 he berated the intelligentsia to Suvorin: The best modern writers, whom I love, serve evil, since they destroy. Some of them, like Tolstoy, say 'Don't have sex with women, because they have mucous discharges; woman is revolting because her breath smells.'… these writers… help the devil multiply the slugs and woodlice we call intellectuals. Jaded, apathetic, idly philosophizing, a cold intelligentsia, which… is unpatriotic, miserable, colourless, which gets drunk on one glass and visits 50-kopeck brothels. Anton defended only medical science: A society that doesn't believe in God but is afraid of omens and the devil, which denies all doctors and then hypocritically mourns Botkin
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ANNlS.KS 1)1 \'i: I. IK I NAG E and bows down to [Professor of Medicine] Zakharin, should not dare hint that it knows what justice is. Suvorin realized what was coming: Anton was abandoning Literature his mistress for Medicine his wife.
THIRTY Ô
Arming for the Crusade December 1889-April 1890 BY THE END OF 1889 Anton had resolved to make a long journey -from which he thought he might not return - over Siberia to the edge of the Russian empire, the island of Sakhalin, Russia's grimmest penal colony. His family and friends had hints - his ardent obituary of the explorer of Central Asia, Nikolai Przhevalsky; his reading of Misha's old law-lecture notes, geography textbooks, maps, political journalism; contact with administrators of Siberia's prison empire. Ever since childhood Anton had been an avid reader of explorers' biographies and geographers' descriptions. Now, shaken by Kolia's death, he was seeking to emulate Przhevalsky's heroic exploits. After The Wood Demon, the writer felt humiliated, and the doctor-scientist in his personality took the lead. Not for the last time, Anton's entangled love life made the life of a solitary wanderer seem particularly alluring to him.
After the first performance of The Wood Demon friends expected Chekhov to flee, as he had after both premieres of Ivanov, to the other capital city, but Anton put off his New Year visit to Petersburg. The Suvorins drank Anton's health in his absence. He had fled to the Kiseliovs at Babkino. He composed for Maria Kiseliova an opening line of a story 'On such and such a date hunters wounded a young female elk in the Daragan forest' and left the rest for her to write. Anton, however, had an ulterior motive for going back to Babkino: he needed to talk to Maria's brother-in-law, a Senator Golubev, who could get him a berth on a ship that returned via China and India from Sakhalin to Odessa. In exchange for the Kiseliovs' help he agreed to examine Maria's father who was dying in Petersburg.
Around 4 January 1890, Chekhov took horses from Babkino and rejoined the railway north: he went to Petersburg with Maria Kiseliova and her younger daughter. In Petersburg, too he had business: he
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ANNIES Dl' I'fc I.HIIINAGE wanted to ask the Department of Taxes to give his brother Misha a job, and Kleopatra Karatygina asked him to persuade Suvorin to give her work. Above all, he needed official support for his journey to Sakhalin.
Anton spent a month lobbying in the city. Suvorin's name opened the doors of ministries and the prison administration, but Suvorin disapproved of Chekhov's journey: it was hazardous, and would take his closest friend away for a year. Chekhov saw the director of prisons, Galkin-Vraskoi, who, when Anton undertook to review his report, promised that Siberia's prison gates would be opened to Chekhov (and then sent a secret telegram to ensure the opposite). Suvorin gave Anton a newspaper correspondent's card.
Chekhov's plans were praised in the newspapers. Many Russian writers had made involuntary, often one-way, journeys to Siberia; none had undertaken voluntary exploration. This journey to the heart of evil was a Dantean exploit that rehabilitated Chekhov in radical eyes. They hoped Chekhov would discover on Sakhalin a set of coherent 'ideals'. Perhaps Anton's main reason for making this suicidal journey was to silence accusations that he was indifferent to the suffering he portrayed. The Russian Zolas - Korolenko and Ertel - withdrew their strictures. The animals in the literary zoo were envious of Chekhov's limelight; some of them were even glad that he would be out of the way for the rest of the year. From Petersburg Gruzinsky wrote to Ezhov (in Moscow playing whist with Vania and Misha): 'It's excellent that Chekhov is going; Sakhalin is not the point, the point is travelling the great oceans and meeting prisoners.' The right wing, however, sneered: before Anton set off, Burenin wrote: The talented writer Chekhov To distant Sakhalin trekked off. He searched its grim quarries For ideas for stories, But finding there a total lack, Took the earliest steamboat back. Inspiration, says this fable, Lies beneath the kitchen table. Obsessed with his expedition, Anton lost interest in his elder brother. When Suvorin asked, Anton demurred: