In Petersburg Pavel, an eager mourner, told Anton on 12 October 1892: I attended Requiems twice with the numerous presence of his admirers at the Volkovo cemetery, the sung requiem was solemn… for his two visits to us at Melikhovo I said a heartfelt prayer for his soul's peace… The last time he had not wanted to leave us, he kept taking his leave…
Aleksandr and his family send their regards and he asks you to sell him 12 to 15 acres of land to build a House just in case for his family, for his family is multiplying and he proposes to make himself a settlement. I am very pleased that sobriety, love, harmony, peace and calm have settled in their family. God grant that we be the same.
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Aleksandr had forsworn not only alcohol, but also meat. Anton's publication in the 'enemy' Russian Thought made Aleksandr fear for his job, all the more since Suvorin, sliding into depression, was letting his paper slip into the hands of the Dauphin, who loathed Aleksandr. Anton had to mend fences with Suvorin: over eighteen months he had written nothing for him.
Anton was content among the peasantry, his Serpukhov colleagues, and even his neighbours. Only police officials repelled him. Siren voices called Anton to Moscow. Lika was desperate for comfort. On 8 October she broke her silence and appealed: I am burning my life, come and help as soon as possible burn it out, because the sooner the better… You used to say that you loved immoral women - so you won't be bored with me, either. Even though you won't answer my letters, now perhaps you will write something, because writing to a woman such as I'm becoming really doesn't put you under any obligations, and anyway I am dying, perishing day by day and all par depit. Oh, save me and come! Till we meet. L. Mizinova. Vania had cleaned up his school house, and the Chekhovs had accommodation. On 15 October 1892, when cholera was declared vanquished, Anton came to Moscow for two days. He dined with his editors and erstwhile enemies, Vukol Lavrov and Viktor Goltsev, but spurned Gruzinsky and Ezhov. He must have contacted Lika, for at the weekend, classes over, Lika and Masha left for Melikhovo, followed by Anton with Pavel.
Lika had, however, received little comfort. Anton told Suvorin that he was bored without 'strong love', and Smagin 'there are no new attachments and the old are gone rusty'. Anton wanted to travel even further than in 1890: he would write all winter to earn the fare to Chicago to visit, with the Dauphin, the 1893 International Exhibition. First he had to go to Petersburg. Anna Suvorina summoned him twice: Anton, has my image utterly vanished from your heart? Do you really not want to see me? I suddenly felt a terrible desire to meet you and talk… Can you really not get over Lenochka Pleshcheeva choosing somebody else? Well it was all your own fault and who could have supposed afterwards!!! Come, my dear Anton, I'll find you a bride here.20
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The next day (26 October) Anna wrote:
… now I'm writing seriously with an outright demand that you come. Aleksei [Suvorin] is unwell, he has fainting fits, Liolia [the Dauphin] and I are at our wits' end and awfully worried. We ask you to help us. Anton did not come. He told Suvorin, in the callous tone of the doctors in his plays, to take valerian, and to carry a folding chair wherever he went. Suvorin's desperate reply, however, panicked Anton. He told Shcheglov that he was rushing to Suvorin's bedside, for fear of a death 'that would age me about ten years'. On 30 October 1892 Anton went to Petersburg. News of Suvorin's illness spread through Moscow.21
Anton found Suvorin physically welclass="underline" the only visible cause for depression was that the ceiling of his mansion had collapsed. He and Anton talked, drank and ate oysters.22 When Suvorin fell silent, Anton reviewed manuscripts for the Dauphin. One was a ghastly survey by Dr Sviatlovsky called How Doctors Live and Die - suicide, tuberculosis and typhus.
Back in Moscow on 7 November, Anton felt ilclass="underline" to save money he had travelled third class, and was choked by cigar smoke. The road to Melikhovo, now under snow, was passable, and the next weekend the Chekhov brothers' women friends, Lika, Countess Mamuna and Aleksandra Liosova, descended. Lika did not enjoy her stay: she was sought out only by Countess Mamuna, who did not want to be alone with Misha. Lika returned to Moscow with Masha the following Tuesday. In Moscow she met a new friend of Anton's, the young poetess Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik. This was a new blow to Lika, and her letters, by late November, become plaintive: 'I am annoyed that I… went to Melikhovo… and again I have no idea where to get away from anguish and the realization that no one needs me.' Anton refused to respond seriously: Masha had seen Lika at a symphony concert in a new blue dress. He answered with a spoof from one of'Lika's Lovers' to another: Trofim! If you, you son of a bitch, don't stop chasing after Lika, then, you sod, I shall stick a corkscrew up the bit of you that rhymes with farce. You turd! Don't you know L. is mine and that we have two children?
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As November ended blizzards nil Melikhovo off. Anton wrote The Island of Sakhalin and reports on the Tolokonnikovs' tannery at the nearby village of Kriukovo. Lika's phrase, par dipt, also inspired him. He began 'Big Volodia and Little Volodia': a young woman, married par depit to an older man, is seduced by a younger man. Neither loves her. That freezing week Anton wrote a passionate apologia for his own 'mediocrity' to Suvorin. (Suvorin had read 'Ward No. 6' with all the more distaste because it was in Russian Thought) You are a hardened drunkard and I have treated you to sweet lemonade and while you grant lemonade its due, you righdy note that lemonade has no spirit. There is none of the alcohol which would make you drunk and enthralled… The reasons are not stupidity or mediocrity or arrogance, as Burenin thinks, but a disease worse for an artist than syphilis and sexual exhaustion. We haven't got 'it', true, and so, if you lift up our muse's skirt, you will find a flat place. Remember, that writers whom we call great or just good and who make us drunk have one common, very important feature: they are going somewhere and calling you with them, and you feel not with your mind but your whole being that mey have a goal, like die ghost of Hamlet's father. Suvorin was so bewildered by the letter that he asked his Petersburg crony, Sazonova, if Chekhov had gone mad. Sazonova, yet another Petersburg woman who did not take to Anton, wrote in her diary that, on the contrary, Chekhov was 'all there'; to Suvorin she berated Chekhov for not taking life as it came. Suvorin sent her letter to Anton, who sneered that Sazonova was 'a person who is far from life-enhancing'.
December's stiller weather brought fresh company every day - old friends like Kundasova, as well as casual visitors who shamelessly ate the Chekhovs' food, bedded down in their drawing room and bearded the writer in his den. Suvorin, addicted to painkillers, now appealed for help. Anton went back to Petersburg. On 20 December, as blizzards hit Melikhovo, he came into the warm. He stayed away from family and Moscow for over five weeks - well past his name day. Anton brought Suvorin his last gasp for New Times, a Christmas story called 'Fears'. He dined with Leikin. Moscow friends were hurt that Anton did not even mention his passing through. In Moscow he called on Lika and Masha for a few minutes only, but took the actress
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/ankovetskaia to the music hall.23 He did not warn Aleksandr and Natalia that he was coming to Petersburg.