Neither did he understand all he heard. Anton had only schoolboy German. He was to tell Ezhov, 'I speak all languages except foreign ones. Getting from one station to another in Paris is for me a game of blind man's buff.' The Suvorins bore the brunt of the expense, decided the itinerary and did the talking. On the one hand Anton liked being treated 'like a kept woman' - he called himself the 'Nana of the Railways' and enjoyed the physical comforts: the Pullman sleeping cars with mirrors, carpets and soft beds; the flushing lavatories. He was amazed, as he had been on the Amur, by free speech - frank conversations with strangers in Moscow could lead to trouble with the secret police. In Vienna, he told his family, 'It is strange that you can read and talk about whatever you want.' On the other hand, he was quickly soured: when he crossed the border into Austro-Hungary his only note was 'A lot of Yids. The customs charged more than my tobacco cost.' As he came over the Alps to Venice, he declared them inferior to the Caucasus or the mountains of Ceylon.
Venice, however, aroused his enthusiasm: Desdemona's house and Canova's tomb sent Anton into ecstasy. He told Vania: 'For a Russian, poor and degraded, here in the world of beauty, wealth and freedom, it is not hard to go mad… when you stand in church listening to the organ you want to convert to Catholicism.' In Venice Zinaida Gippius turned up and pricked the bubble. Like many Petersburg snobs, she felt impelled to put provincial upstarts down, and wilfully misinformed Anton that the hotel charges were by the week, not the day. She noted in her diary that he was 'A normal provincial doctor.
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ANNA'S 1)1 1'i.l.IRINAGE he had fine powers of observation within his limits, and rather coarse manners, which was also normal.'
By 30 March the party was in Rome. Anton was wan. He asked the hotel porter, Suvorin claimed, for the address of Rome's most luxurious brothel. He reported to Uncle Mitrofan that the Vatican had 11,000 rooms; later he said that Rome was just like Kharkov. Letters home ask only after the mongoose. About Lika and her cough, or the convalescent Vania and his dormitories full of workers' children, he did not enquire. On 3 April the Suvorins and Anton went to Naples; on the 6th they toured Pompeii. Years later Suvorin recalled: He was litde interested in art, statues, pictures, churches, but as soon as we got to Rome he wanted to get out of town, to lie on die green grass. In Venice it was the originality, most of all the life, serenades, not its Doges' palace and so on, that held him. In Pompeii he wandered bored over the open city - it is boring in fact - but immediately he took pleasure in riding a horse to Vesuvius over a very difficult route and kept edging towards the crater. Abroad, cemeteries interested him everywhere - cemeteries and circuses with clowns, which he saw as real comedians.34 The party then took the coastal railway to Nice, a city Anton little suspected was to become a second home (it was a resort for Russians, rich and sick, and the Russian navy). Lika did not write. Pavel reported: 'The mongoose is well, its behaviour is incorrigible but deserves leniency.' To Vania Pavel was franker: 'The mongoose gives us no peace, it bit off a piece of mama's nose in the night, she was frightened when she saw the blood. Now it has healed.'35 Anton wrote back. He confessed that he would miss Easter. He and the Dauphin discovered Monte Carlo. For several days they took the train there to play roulette. In two days Anton lost 800 francs.
Three days later the party took the express to Paris. Anton celebrated Easter in the Russian Orthodox church, amazed that French and Greek Christians should be singing the Bortniansky anthems he had sung as a boy in Taganrog. May Day in Paris gave Anton food for thought. He mingled with a crowd of rioting Paris workers and was himself manhandled by the police. Three days later he sat in the public gallery of the French parliament and listened to something unimaginable in Russia - deputies calling on the Minister for the Interior to account for the deaths of seven workers. Paris, as much JANUARY-MAY l8oi as Sakhalin, developed Anton's political consciousness. Meanwhile Suvorin decided to commission a bronze bust of himself (which he was later to present to Chekhov), and while the sculptor carved, Anton and the Dauphin toured the nightclubs and watched naked women. On 2/14 May Anton was back in Moscow.
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THIRTY-FOUR
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Summer at Bogimovo May-July 1891 ANTON STAYED ONE DAY on the Malaia Dmitrovka. (Of the twenty months that the family rented Firgang's house, Anton lived there fewer than five.) The day after his arrival Evgenia, Masha, Anton and Sod the mongoose left for a dacha that Misha had found them near Aleksin on the river Oka, a beautiful region of wooded hills that was somewhat fancifully called the 'Russian Switzerland'. Probably the palm cat came to a sticky end that spring. Floor-polishers came to the Firgang house while Pavel was in charge and flushed it from its lair beneath the wash-stand: one workman, his little finger badly bitten, reacted violently.36
Pavel retired on 30 April 1891. With his sons in Petersburg, Sudogda, Aleksin and Nice, he portrayed his future as bleak. His employer of the last fourteen years, Gavrilov's parting remark was, 'Your children are bastards'.37
Cousin Aliosha Dolzhenko also left Gavrilov - for a more generous employer. As his family left for the country Pavel told Vania: I remain in Moscow to put the flat in order. Antosha had brought you remarkable gifts: a purse with two French gold coins, paper and envelopes from the Louvre shop… I can choose my life and my locality. I think it best for me to spend my days among my own family, rather than in coarse and rude society. All this time I have been living for the family and have laboured for it, I have left the Slough of Gavrilov without a penny, I hope that my family will not leave me penniless… I shall be well fed, clothed and not want for anything.38 The dacha, surrounded by woods, was just across the river Oka from Aleksin. There were no latrines - Anton was constantly running to a gully - the house was cramped and trains noisily crossed the Oka on a rickety bridge. When Pavel arrived three days later, conditions were
MAY-JULY 1891
intolerable. The mongoose was breaking crockery and uncorking bottles. Chekhov could not work: 'Writing, I'm like a crayfish sitting in a trap with other crayfish.'
After a breach of three months in their relationship, Lika brought Anton salvation. She arrived with Levitan by river-boat; she flaunted the painter all summer to flush Anton out. Anton reacted only with more irony: he openly referred to Levitan as Phaon, to Levitan's mistress Sofia Kuvshinnikova as Sappho, and to Lika as Sappho's young rival Melitta.39 On the boat Lika and Levitan were accosted by a local landowner Evgenii Bylim-Kolosovsky, a tiresome idealist with a large estate at Bogimovo, ten miles from Aleksin. Bylim-Kolosovsky needed sympathetic ears and a supplementary income: when he heard that the Chekhovs were dissatisfied with their quarters he sent two troikas to fetch them to Bogimovo, where he offered them the upper storey of the manor house for the summer. Masha recalls: 'We saw a large neglected estate with an enormous two-storey house, two or three cottages and a splendid old park with avenues and ponds.'
Amenaisa Chaleeva, a toothless red-head ('dim and vicious', decided Anton) was Bylim-Kolosovsky's mistress and ran his model dairy. She recalled Chekhov: A man who looked about thirty, pale, thin, seemingly very pleasant. A home-made sailcloth jacket, a broad grey hat. I thought, he can't afford our dacha - 160 roubles for the summer… We enter the drawing room, a long room with windows looking out on a lime avenue, columns in the middle, a parquet floor, long leather divans along the walls, a big round table, a few ancient armchairs. The man saw all this and even cried out with pleasure: 'Oh I've been looking for something like this! And the parquet squeaks with age, the divans are antediluvian… What happiness. This will be my room and I'll work here.'40 In the move from Aleksin to Bogimovo the mongoose vanished into the woods. Anton stirred up neighbouring landowners. The one reply was distraught: Dear Mr Chekhov, I inform you of the terrible grief that has struck me today: at 6 this morning my father died of acute pneumonia. I have asked many people in Seianovo about the mongoose, but it hasn't turned up.41