Melikhovo became all Anton's. After dinner, on 3 June, Misha, Masha and Vania left Melikhovo for the south. They stayed for two days with Georgi in Taganrog. This was Masha's first visit since she was a child: she bathed in the Sea of Azov. From Taganrog Vania returned to Melikhovo three weeks later, but Misha and Masha took Anton's route of 1888, by sea to Batum and then overland to
349
1.1ÊË IJ1SPARUE
Kislovodsk. They returned late on zH June 'thin, tired, exhausted, yet full of the joys of life,' Vania reported to his wife. While Anton enjoyed three weeks' solitude, Pavel ploughed the parched earth, sold the hay, called out the vet47 to a sick cow, and bought new striking clocks - the elder Chekhovs' main extravagance.
Olga Kundasova began to frequent the house: Pavel recorded her as 'living with us'. To Suvorin Anton complained: 'This person in big doses, no thanks! It's easier hauling water from a deep well.' Olga left to spend the rest of the year with her sister, 1500 miles away in Batum. Anton managed her better, as she acknowledged next Apriclass="underline" I am struck by many things in your attitude to me that have come to the surface recently, I am struck because I myself am now stony ground, and there was a time when I was good soil. (I ask you when reading this part of my letter not to indulge in the pornographic ideas so typical of you.) Anton had learnt to say no with yet more determination. He refused to help Olga assemble a library for the psychiatric hospital. He did however defend the peasant arsonist, Epifan Volkov, and after a year, the investigating magistrate, an admirer of Anton's plays, released Volkov. Mitrofan's younger son, Volodia, was expelled from a seminary, and Anton interceded to save him from conscription.
Peace ended on 20 June, when Mitrofan's widow Liudmila came to stay for forty days with her two teenage daughters, Aleksandra and Elena. Anton delighted in their domesticity, and the two girls were exceptionally pretty. Only Pavel counted the days to their departure, despite Liudmila's enthusiasm for Matins and Vespers at Vaskino and the Monastery. Three weeks after these relatives left, Aunt Marfa Loboda, the widow of Ivan Morozov (Evgenia's brother), came for a week. Of all her in-laws Evgenia liked Marfa best: together they prayed at the monastery church.
The gestation of Chekhov's new play, The Seagull, was interrupted by a suicidal incident that Anton was to use as the play's crowning touch. Levitan was at Gorki, a remote estate, halfway between Moscow and Petersburg, which belonged to his mistress, Anna Turchani-nova. Like Sofia Kuvshinnikova, she was married and ten years older than Levitan. She had three daughters, of whom Levitan seduced at least one. He had a row with Anna Turchaninova, and on 21 June he
35°
JUNE-SEPTEMBER 1895
pulled out a revolver and shot himself in the head. The wound was slight, but Levi tan's mood was not. On 23 June he wrote to Anton: Dear Anton, if at all possible, come to see me, just for a few days. I am horribly unhappy, worse than ever. I would come to see you but I have no strength left. Don't refuse. A big room is at your disposal in a house where I live alone, in the woods, on the shore of a lake. Neither compassion nor the fishing moved Anton, so Anna Turchaninova wrote: I don't know you, Mr Chekhov, but I have an urgent request at the insistence of the doctor treating Isaak. Levitan is suffering very severe depression which is pulling him into the most terrible state. On 21 June, in a minute of despair, he tried to kill himself. Fortunately we managed to save him. The wound is no longer dangerous, but Levitan needs meticulous, loving and friendly care. Knowing from what he has said that you are a close friend, I decided to write and ask you to come and see the patient immediately. A man's life depends on your coming. You, only you, can save him and bring him out of complete indifference to life, and at times a furious determination to kill himself.48 On 5 July, telling nobody where he was going, Anton made his way to Gorki and saw Levitan. From Gorki he wrote to Leikin to say he 'was on the shores of a lake 50 miles from Bologoe' for ten days. He told Suvorin that he was with a patient on the Turchaninova estate, 'a marshy place, smelling of Polovtsians and Pechenegs'.
Anton stayed only five days and, instead of turning home, travelled just as secretively from Bologoe to Petersburg. Leikin learnt that Anton was at Suvorin's. He drove straight round to see Anton there 'thin and jaundiced'; Anton claimed Suvorin had telegraphed for him. Leikin's were not the only prying eyes; Kleopatra Karatygina hoped to join Suvorin's new theatre and, like many actresses Anton had known, she named him as a referee.
Anton was back in Melikhovo by 18 July. Tania and Sasha Seli-vanova, whom he now called the 'enchanting little widow', joined him. Four days later, Anton went back to Moscow to see Suvorin: they spent two days walking and talking. Suvorin came down to Melikhovo to meet Tania and talk about the theatre. On 24 July Pavel's
351
1.1ÊË DIM'ARUK
diary records: 'Full moon. The guests went for a walk in the woods.' The walk shaped Tania's future. She charmed Suvorin, who would prepare the way for her in Petersburg. Tania was translating Edmond Rostand's La Princesse lointaine - a source for the cult of the 'Beautiful Lady' in Russian symbolist drama. (Tania's enthusiasm for modern French drama made Anton spend several weeks studying French grammar.) In The Seagull, the little play that Treplev stages to annoy his mother parodies Russian plays yet unwritten: the Symbolist drama which Tania was adapting and Hannele's Assumption, in which the pretty Liudmila Ozerova had made her debut, helped Chekhov imagine what such drama might sound like in Russian.
The Seagull is full of cruel parody. The shot bird symbolizing youth destroyed was aimed at Ibsen's Wild Duck; the young writer Treplev, jealous of his mother's lover, parodies Hamlet and Gertrude. The middle-aged actress, Arkadina, who holds all the men - her brother Sorin, her son Treplev and her lover Trigorin - in thrall, caricatures every actress that Anton had ever disliked, and echoes Iavorskaia's mannerisms, such as kneeling before Anton, like Vasantasena before Charudatta, calling him 'my only one!' The boring schoolteacher Medvedenko mimics Mikhailov, the teacher in the village of Talezh, near Melikhovo. The medallion that Nina gives Trigorin with the coded reference to his lines 'If you need my life, come and take it', mocks Avilova and her medallion. The lakeside setting of The Seagull, the pointless killing of the seagull, and Treplev's first attempt to shoot himself, all commemorate Levitan. The unhappy fate of Nina, adored by Treplev and seduced by Trigorin, reflects - and, as we shall see, anticipates - the story of Lika, Anton and Potapenko.
Chekhov was most cruel to himself. Trigorin, the traditional writer, and Treplev, the innovator, standing for old and new movements, both ineffectual and mediocre, really personify two aspects of Chekhov, one the analytical follower of Turgenev and Tolstoy, the other the visionary prose-poet. Much of Trigorin is Anton - with his fishing rods, his dislike of scented flowers, his self-disparagement. Lines from Chekhov's prose (a description of a broken bottle on a weir) and from his letters (to Lika about obsessive writing) are given to Trigorin in the play. Like Potapenko, however, Trigorin seduces and abandons Nina; like Anton, Treplev is the man to whom she briefly returns, undeterred in her desire for a career on stage. The Seagull is neverthe352
JUNE-SEPTEMBER 1895
less not primarily a confessional work: Trigorin is only part Potapenko and Anton only part Treplev. The authorial Chekhov is there as Doctor Dorn who looks on with amused compassion, and deflects possessive women.