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consider a close friend! No, joking apart, I somehow hope you will want to meet me…43 By 15 March 1894 Lika was in Berlin, on her way to join Potapenko in Paris.
Anton decided to leave the frozen north himself. He made enquiries about a sunny hotel room at Gurzuf, near Yalta in the Crimea, to spend a month recuperating in the warmth, while Masha and Pavel coped with ploughing and sowing. In five days of February spent in Moscow, Anton rejoined a minage-a-trois with Tania and Lidia Iavorskaia in the Hotel Louvre. He posed for a photograph in which the two women look adoringly at him, while his attention has been caught by the photographer: the picture became known as The Temptations of St Antony. Iavorskaia's adoration had a price. She wrote on 1 February: On 18 February I have my benefit night in Moscow… I hope you remember the promise you made to write me at least a one-act play. You told me the plot, it is so entertaining that I am still under its spell and have decided, for some reason, that the play will be called Daydreams. i Anton never wrote a word of Daydreams. Tania, instead, wrote for her a one-act comedy called At the Station. She wanted to present Iavorskaia with a framed blotting-pad - the frame to be engraved with autographs from her admirers. Anton refused to inscribe his name on it. Levitan had offered. 'Believe in yourself, I. Levitan', and Anton would not join his old friend, even on a piece of silver.
In February 1894 the managers of the Hotel Louvre and Madrid decided that the comings and goings through the 'Pyrenees' brought the hotels more notoriety than profit: Tania and Iavorskaia were asked to leave. By April they were living as lovers in the Vesuvius Hotel in Naples.
On 2 March, after seeing Potapenko off to Petersburg, Anton left for the Crimea. He steamed past Melikhovo without stopping at Lopasnia station.
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Lika Disparue ô Ariane, ma soeur, de quel amour blessee Vous mourutes aux bords ou vous futes laissee! Racine, Phedre The spirit in which Albertine had left was doubtless like that of peoples who use a demonstration of their armed strength to further the work of their diplomacy. Proust, Albertine disparue
FORTY-THREE
Ô
Abishag cherishes David March-June 1894 IN MARCH 1894 the Chekhov squadron scattered south and west from Moscow and Melikhovo. On the 4th Anton came ashore at Yalta, storm-tossed but not seasick. Instead of the tiny resort of Gurzuf, he chose Yalta. Settled in a hotel, he had a telegram from Tania and Iiivorskaia in Warsaw. Masha wrote on 13 March: 'I was sad to see I «ika off and I miss her very badly. Be well and don't cough… Mother asks, should she slaughter the bigger pig for Easter?' Lika Mizinova and her 'chaperone' Varia Eberle joined Potapenko in Paris on 16 March: Lika wrote to Anton from Berlin on the 15th: I shall die soon and shan't see anything more. Darling, write for old time's sake and don't forget that you gave me your word of honour to come to Paris in June. I shall wait for you and if you write, shall come and meet you. You can count on accommodation, meals and all comforts from me: only the travel will cost you anything. Well, till we meet, hurry, till we meet, definitely in Paris. Don't forget the woman you rejected, [wavy line] L. Mizinova.1 Anton was in no hurry even to reply. He merely told his French translator (while ordering 100 bottles of best Bordeaux) to look up Potapenko and 'a plump blonde Mile Mizinova' in Paris. Anton slept till eleven in the morning, and in the evenings chatted to the intellectuals who, hoping for an early spring, were in Yalta for the good of their lungs. They offered no stimulation, although Miroliubov, an opera singer,2 and an actress adopted Anton and took him over the mountains. Through Miroliubov Chekhov met a medical colleague, I)r Sredin, as consumptive as his patients. Only a few officials fostered culture in Yalta, a seaside town too small to support more than a bookshop, amateur theatricals and a three-form girl's grammar school. Lika had jumped from one menage-a-trois into another. Potapenko's
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II Ê À 1)1.SI'A HUE
wife was waiting in Paris. Lika told 'Ciranny' that she was settled in a pleasant house with a life on Rue I lamelin, seeking a singing teacher. To Masha she was frank: 'Ignati said that he found his spouse very ill and thinks that she has consumption, but I think that she is faking again.'3
Lidia Iavorskaia was happier in her new love life, but in Milan she received a letter which her spurned lover, a customs official, had written to her father, Chief of Police Hiibbenett. It ran: Your daughter has left for Italy with Madame Shchepkina-Kupernik, this departure naturally forces me to burn my boats and I shall not direct a single word of reproach at your daughter. Her liaison with Shchepkina-Kupernik has become a vile legend in Moscow, and no wonder… nobody can pass undefiled by contact with her.4 On 23 March Lidia scrawled a letter to Anton, asking him to protect Tania's name. She was proud to be loved by Tania and wanted Anton to use his connections in Petersburg to silence her former lover in the Customs department.
Far from friends, Anton could write again. He was preoccupied with his shortest mature story, 'The Student' - a work which he himself singled out for its concise perfection, as Beethoven did his Eighth Symphony. A student priest crossing a valley before Easter awkwardly retells the betrayal of Christ to two peasant widows, mother and daughter. The women cry, and he intuits a connection between their misery, the tragedy around Christ, the human condition and history. The priest once again represents the creative writer, communicating a force he cannot comprehend to others even more helpless. Poetic economy and subtle symbolic detail distinguish 'The Student'. This is 'late Chekhov', where the protagonist's and the author's eyes become one, and where all is evoked, not stated. Solitude had sprung an inner lock. His friends and mistresses scattered, Anton found an affinity in his fictional characters, and his prose develops an intimate warmth. Anton had shaken off ideological constraints, too. He told Suvorin: Perhaps because I've stopped smoking, Tolstoy's morality has stopped moving me, in the depth of my soul I am hostile to it, and that of course is unjust. Peasant blood flows in me, and you can't astound me with peasant virtues. Since I was a child I have believed
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MARCH-JUNE 1894
in progress and could not do otherwise, since the difference between the time when I was thrashed and the times when thrashing stopped has been enormous. I love clever people, sensitivity, politeness, wit… I was affected not by the basic propositions, which were known earlier, but the Tolstoyan way of expressing oneself, the didacticism and probably a sort of hypnotism. Now something in me protests; calculation and justice tell me that electricity and steam show more love for humanity than chastity and vegetarianism. Sleeping better (and alone), not smoking, drinking little, Anton was bored in Yalta. His heart showed only physical symptoms, arrhythmia. On 27 March 1894 he wrote curtly to Lika: he was not coming to Paris, he told her, and Potapenko should buy her a ticket home. Irony drowns affection: Dear Lika, when you are a big singer and have a good salary, give me alms: make me your husband and feed me at your expense, so that I can be idle. But if you are dying, then let Varia Eberle, whom as you know I love, do it. We hear the first hints of The Seagull, to which Lika was to contribute so much. As Trigorin tells Nina in the play, Anton tells Lika: Not for a minute am I free of the thought that I must, am obliged to write. Write, write and write.' To write and write was not easy in a hotel room: visitors were importunate. One even removed the manuscript of The Island of Sakhalin to read at leisure.