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ANNf'I'S i)l I'flKKlNAGE Lika and Levitan had left. Anton, his affections revived, invited Lika back to Bogimovo; he also invited Suvorin, Vania and Aliosha Dolzh-enko. Bogimovo, which still stands, was magnificently placed near the top of a steep hill. Great windows to the west overlooked a stream; the morning light came through equally large windows and the park on the east. Anton established an arduous regime. He rose at 4.00 a.m., made coffee and worked while the household slept until eleven. Then they walked, played, lunched, gathered mushrooms, caught fish and rested. Anton sat down to work again at three and worked until dark, at 9.00 p.m., after which came supper, cards, bonfires, charades, arguments, personal and philosophical, and visits to neighbours. On Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays he wrote The Island of Sakhalin; on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays 'The Duel'; on Sundays he composed bread-and-butter fiction, such as 'Peasant Women', a story of indignant women listening to a traveller telling them how he drove a neighbour's wife to her death. He kept up a furious rhythm, with only two or three hours' sleep a night, for three months, despite toothache, stomach upsets and coughing.
As well as Sod, Anton had mislaid Lika. His invocations lost their power. Signing himself as a laxative mineral water, Hunyadi Janos, he appealed: Golden, mother-of-pearl, fil d'Ecosse Lika! The mongoose ran away the day before yesterday and will never ever return. He's kicked it… Come and sniff flowers, catch fish, go for walks and howl. O, fair Lika! When you watered my right shoulder with your howling tears (I've removed the stains with benzene) and ate our bread in big slices and our beef, we were greedily devouring your face and the back of your neck. It was Levitan who answered, not altogether in jest: Everything, beginning with the air and ending, God forbid me, with the most insignificant bug on earth, is imbued with the divine Lika! She isn't here yet but she will be, for she doesn't love you, me tow-haired, but me, the volcanic dark-haired man, and she will only go where I am. It hurts you to read tbis but love of truth prevents me from hiding the fact. We have settled in Tver province near the estate of Panafidin, [Lika's uncle]… I'm a sheer psychopath! You'll find it interesting if you come - wonderful fishing and our rather
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nice company, consisting of Sofia [Kuvshinnikova], me, the Friend and the Vestal Virgin. Suvorin came for a few days and contemplated buying a neighbouring estate, a house with a mezzanine, where he might spend summers next to Chekhov. Masha fell ill with symptoms of typhoid. This concerned Levitan, who wrote again: Lika says that if there were anything serious about Masha's illness you wouldn't have written in such a playful tone. How did you lose the mongoose? What the devil is all this? It's simply obscene to bring an animal from Ceylon only to lose it in Kaluga province!!! You are all phlegm - to write about Masha's illness and the loss of the mongoose in cold blood as if they were only to be expected! Sofia Kuvshinnikova (like Zinaida Gippius, she loathed Chekhov as he loathed her) added reproaches: I don't understand how you could let this little foreign mongoose go to his doom. I am beginning simply to think that you, Chekhov, were terribly envious of its popularity and so neglected your rival on purpose! Anton felt deserted: first by Lika, then by Sod, and now by his sister, for Masha soon recovered and left for Sumy to be with Natalia Lintvariova.
Anton was discussing sex by letter with Suvorin. In mid May 1891 Petersburg buzzed with the delinquencies of a schoolgirl, daughter of a senior civil servant: her lover's trial went into closed session. Suvorin knew the details. Anton reacted by saying that nymphomaniacs should be incarcerated, and that the schoolgirl, 'if she doesn't die of consumption, will be writing edifying tracts, plays and letters from Berlin or Vienna - she has an expressive and very literary style.'42 Suvorin responded with another letter on the depravity of modern schoolgirls. On 27 May Anton pointed out that they were no worse than Shakespeare's fourteen-year-old Juliet. He added: 'By the way, about little girls' but the next fourteen lines are so heavily inked out, by Suvorin or Masha, that Anton's views remain unfathomable. In him, as in Suvorin, prurience and prudishness alternated unpredictably. Anton, like Suvorin, appreciated female sexuality, but unlike
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Suvorin, feared sex as an addiction which, were he to surrender to it, would annul his freedom and stifle his creativity. On 2 June hunters on the other side of the Oka found an animal hiding in a crack in a quarry. It came out to greet them and they recognized it as Chekhov's mongoose. Sod was captured and taken to Bogimovo, where he enjoyed prancing with the children of the neighbouring families. When Anton spotted a snake in the grass, Sod was brought out to show his prowess.
June 1891 was an exotic pastorale. Lika and Anton resumed their correspondence in mid-June, Anton teasing, Lika pretending to be evasive. She spent a few days in Moscow vainly looking for a better flat for the Chekhovs; back with Levitan, she stressed that Sofia Kuv-shinnikova watched, that she was too unwell to go outdoors in the evening. Anton told his 'enchanting, amazing Lika' to come, despite 'being carried away by the Circassian Levitan' or 'things will go badly'. He sent her a photograph of an officer on the Petersburg and signed it 'Your Petia'. Lika did not come. Her assurances of her innocence were unconvincing: We have a splendid garden and what's more Levitan, whom, anyway, I can only lick my lips at, since he doesn't dare come near me, and we're never left alone. Sofia is very nice; she is now very kind and utterly sincere with me. Clearly, she is now quite sure that I cannot be a danger to her.43 Sofia Kuvshinnikova, everyone knew, had lasted so long because she put up with Levitan's polygamy. At the height of summer, however, Sofia Kuvshinnikova left Zatishie. Levitan was untrammelled: Lika gave him her photograph. At the end of July 1891 Anton sent Lika one last letter, but signed it Masha (the handwriting is Anton's), as if his sister had written it: 'If you have decided to break off your touching triple alliance for a few days, then I'll persuade my brother put off his departure [for Moscow]…' Lika was silent. Suvorin returned briefly, advising Anton not to marry Lika.44
Anton's reaction to what he regarded as Levitan's seduction of Lika was vicious but hidden. His letters stopped. Instead, on 18 August, although work on The Island of Sakhalin was far from complete and his long story, 'The Duel', had only been despatched to Suvorin that
MAY-JULY 189I
day, he wrote to a Petersburg lawyer called Chervinsky. He asked him to find out from the editor of The Cornfield how much they would pay for 'a suitable little story'. Chervinsky took the idea to Tikhonov, editor of The North. Chekhov's revenge on Levitan, Kuvshinnikova and Lika now had an outlet in a story that would be known as 'The Grasshopper'. (Anton's host, Bylim-Kolosovsky, was to wait three years to be even more cruelly caricatured.)