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a thief, and Masha dunks I am in b'eodosia. If they find out I'm abroad, they will be hurt, lor they have long been fed up with my frequent journeys.
I'm not very well. I have an almost continuous cough. I seem to have lost my health as I lost you. Lika did not know where Anton was: two days later she sent a plea to Melikhovo: Not a trace of the old Lika is left and I think, and I can't refrain from saying so, it is all your fault! Anyway, that's fate, it seems! I'll say one thing, I have lived through moments I thought I would never live through! I am alone! There is not a soul around me to tell all that I am going through! God forbid anyone should experience anything like this! All this is vague, but I think it will all be clear to you\ You are supposed to be a psychologist! Why I am writing all this to you, I don't know! All I know is that I am writing to nobody but you! And therefore don't show this letter even to Masha and say nothing! I am in despair: there is no ground beneath one's feet and one feels somewhere, I don't know, somewhere very nasty! I don't know if you will sympathize with me! Since you're a balanced, calm and rational person! Your whole life is for others and you don't seem to want a personal life of your own! Write to me, darling, soon!… Your promises to come are all rubbish! You will never move. Now Suvorin and Anton were in Abbazia, then a fashionable Adriatic resort under Austrian rule. It rained constantly and, Anton told Natalia Lintvariova: 'There are crowds of Yids here; they speak Russian.' To Anton, the only friendly Russian face was that of a wet nurse Anton had once treated. Abbazia reminded Anton of Maupassant's Mont-Orioclass="underline" the journey revived Maupassant's influence in Chekhov's work. On 22 September/4 October he and Suvorin fled to Venice. Lika had replied to Anton, but her letter lay in Abbazia post office, before trailing Anton across Italy: I warn you, be amazed by nothing! If you don't fear being disillusioned by your old Lika, then come! There's no trace of her left! Yes, just six montfrs have turned my life over, not leaving, as they say, a stone standing! Though I don't tiiink you'll throw the first stone at me! I believe you've always been indifferent to people, their failings and weaknesses! Even if you don't come (very likely, given your laziness), then keep everything I write a secret between us,
SEPTEMBER-NOVEMBER 1894
uncle! You are not to tell anybody anything, even Masha!… Are you alone! Or with Suvorin? He is the last person to be told about my existence [Suvorin was a notorious gossip]… Potapenko wrote that he might come to Montreux between 25-30 September. The letter reached Chekhov in Nice two weeks late. Anton told Masha, 'Potapenko is a Yid and a swine.' Lika wrote again: 'Darling I'm alone, very unhappy. Come alone and don't talk about me to anybody.'
By now Anton had Lika's last three letters; he could be in no doubt that Lika was pregnant. He needed a new excuse not to come to her rescue. He chose to use Suvorin as a pretext. On 2/14 October 1894, the same day that he denounced Potapenko to Masha, he sent Lika  chilly note: I can't go to Switzerland: I'm with Suvorin who has to go to Paris. I'll spend 5-7 days in Nice, then go to Paris for 3-4 days, then Melikhovo. I'll be at the Grand Hotel in Paris. You had no cause to write about my indifference to people. Don't pine, be cheerful, look after your health. I bow deeply and firmly, firmly shake your hand. Yours A. Chekhov.
Had I got your letter in Abbazia then I'd have gone via Switzerland to Nice to see you, but now it's awkward to drag Suvorin along. Potapenko too let Lika down: from Petersburg he came for forty-eight hours to Moscow, not to Montreux: he wanted to talk Masha Chekhova round.
Avoiding Switzerland and Lika, Anton found Europe less thrilling than in 1891. He bought three silk ties, a tiepin and some glass in Venice, and caught nettle rash. In Milan he watched a dramatization of Crime and Punishment: he felt that Russian actors were pigs compared with the Italians - an opinion which boded ill for the play he was germinating. He visited first the cathedral, then the crematorium. In Genoa, Anton and Suvorin strolled around the cemetery, then left for what Maupassant called 'the flowering cemetery of Europe', the Cote d'Azur. They spent four days in Nice; here Anton worked on 'Three Years', and 'coughed and coughed and coughed'. He felt misanthropic and told Masha to see that she alone met him at the station when he got back. Suvorin, too, was disgrunded. Sazonova noted: 'A letter from Suvorin in Nice. He and Chekhov are fed up with each
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other, they are both roaming from place to place and saying nothing.' Suvorin never forgot a spat with Anton on the Promenade des Anglais. He asked Anton why he no longer wrote for New Times. Anton curtly told him to change the subject, and his 'eyes flashed'.22 On 6/18 October Anton and Suvorin set off for Paris. They left Paris three days later, just before Lika came down to Paris from the Swiss Alps to seek new lodgings and a midwife.
After a day in Berlin, Anton arrived in Moscow on 14 October. Autumn rains had made the journey to Melikhovo hazardous, so he stayed there for five days and read proofs. He thanked Masha for her hard work with a ring and a promise of 25 roubles. He sent a note to the Louvre and Madrid hotel, for Tania and lavorskaia, who, no longer dressed in violet and green, still astounded Moscow's theatregoers. Anton's note, on a blue card, was in their style: 'At last the waves have cast the madman ashore… and he stretched his arms to two white seagulls…' Lidia lavorskaia responded eagerly: Waiting for you is a hot samovar, a glass of vodka, anything you want, and above all, me. Joking apart, please come tomorrow. You will be off to your village and again I shan't see you for ages. And with you I relax from everybody and everything, my friend, my kind, good man. On 19 October nine degrees of frost hardened the mud roads: Anton returned to Melikhovo, where the family had installed new bedroom floors, a well, a flushing lavatory and new stoves, though they could not raise the temperature in me house that freezing autumn above I5°C. Anton was to stay a whole month in Melikhovo, writing and sleeping in the new guest cottage. Pavel, as he put it, 'moved into His Cell, into the Kingdom of Earth';23 Franz Schechtel had presented the family with their most valuable possession, an Art-Nouveau mantelpiece. There was one drawback. Anton wrote twice to Masha, who was teaching in Moscow: Find out in the shops what the best mouse poison is; the bastards have eaten the wallpaper up to four feet from the floor in the drawing room… If you can't find mouse poison, bring 1 or 2 mousetraps. Soon there was little need for Anton or Masha to leave the estate for Moscow. In mourning for Tsar Alexander III, who died on 20
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October, Moscow's schools and theatres closed. Until the first snow came, in any case, travelling over icy ruts was torture. One journey to a patient nearby made Anton's 'innards turn inside out'.
Lika, in Paris, believed that Anton was still in Nice. Her last letter from Veytaux eventually reached Melikhovo: Lika, in the literal sense, very very much wants to see you, despite my fear that if you ever did have a decent opinion of me it will now change when you see me! But all the same, come! I'm sad, darling, infinitely! Masha shared Lika's mood. On 10 October Masha had gone to Moscow for an event so distressing that the ioth became a bad omen for her. On 10 January 1895 she wrote to Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik: 'a sad event that happened on this very day three months ago makes my mood quite unsuitable for merriment.'24 We do not know what this sad event was: had Masha renounced yet another man? Unhappy, sleepless, she stayed away from Melikhovo until 4 November. She did not meet Tania or lavorskaia. She was taking cod liver oil and putting a cold compress on her heart. When she came, she brought Ivanenko, because she could not face the train journey alone. To judge by his evasive tact, Anton had an inkling of what was behind her anguish -conceivably, she had been seeing Levitan. Anton told Masha to consult his colleague the neurologist Professor Vasili Shervinsky ('and take 5 roubles just in case'): he would help her sleep.