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THE Ã 1.1 Ñ, è I in ÃÍÊ SEAGULL at the station asking me to brinf» you to Petersburg. I'm definitely going on Thursday.4 Misha married Olga at Vaskino church: of the bride's family only Olga's brother came. After the wedding, which did nothing to dispel Anton's boredom in the snow-bound wastes, he met Potapenko in Moscow, and fled to Petersburg for three weeks.
On this second visit Anton stayed in Suvorin's house on Ertel Lane and was subjected to Suvorin's gloom. On 27 January, a night or two after Anton's arrival, the two men went for a long walk. Suvorin recalled the radical daring of his youthful Sketches and Tableaux. Anton asked, 'Why not give me a copy of this book as a present?' but Suvorin had decades ago given away the last copy. The two men went into the next second-hand bookshop they came to, where Suvorin spotted the copy he had given twenty years before to the lawyer who had defended him when the book had been prosecuted. Suvorin inscribed it, and gave it to Anton.
On 2 February Sazonova saw her daughter Liuba act: 'dreary, boring… every mistake she makes is a knife in [Sazonova's husband] Nikolai's heart.' Anton appeared with Suvorin. To her he seemed damaged and she thought the hero's enslavement to the heroine in 'Ariadna' explained it. 'Not much of a story,' she wrote in her diary. 'Some cruel woman must have given him a hard time and he's described her to vent his feelings.' At a banquet for the ageing actress Zhuleva, Suvorin shocked the company by kissing his former contributor Syro-miatnikov. To kiss a man who purloined journalists' copy for the secret police was gross indecency in Russian intellectual circles. Anton was revolted and showed it. He refused Syromiatnikov's hand. The battle for Suvorin's soul intensified. Anton at first hung on: much of 1896 was to be spent together in conversation and communion before the breach between them widened.
Anton's friendship with Potapenko, that had survived such strains, was weakening. Anton avoided seeing him alone. Potapenko was hurt not to be invited to the Zhuleva banquet: Anton did not get him a ticket. Potapenko proposed a journey to Finland; Anton refused. To avoid discussion, he said that he was leaving for Moscow on 10, not 13, February, Potapenko protested: 'As for Finland, that would be really swinish on your part, so you must silence your conscience and
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come.' Two days later, finding Anton still in Petersburg, Potapenko was indignant: 'Let me tell you you are a swine… I shan't see you off because I'm expecting a typewriter to be delivered at 8 this evening.' Anton found Potapenko a bore. He neither sang nor fornicated. The typewriter had replaced his flowing pen and symbolized the domesticity that his second wife had wrought. Potapenko was ending his last fling, with Liudmila Ozerova, whose success in Haupt-mann's Hannele's Ascension and equally spectacular failure in Schiller's Intrigue and Love had awoken Anton's interest. This winter Potapenko introduced the two; by the autumn, Potapenko would cede Ozerova to Anton.
Anton preferred the tedium of Leikin to Potapenko's hen-pecked state. Loyalty to his first regular publisher took Anton not only to pancake night - the last feast before the Orthodox lent - but also to two other evenings, listening while Leikin priced each dish and related his dachshunds' utterances. Apart from a late evening being vamped by Lidia Iavorskaia - who still hoped for a Chekhov play of her own - Anton shunned company. Of his relatives he entertained only his older nephews. He took them to a Punch-and-Judy show, stuffed them with food, and bought them clothes. Aleksandr was gruff: 'Both are greedy, over-ate and we shall have to give them castor oil. The gauntlets will be lost in an hour, and the jackets will be outgrown in 1V2 months… In their sloppiness they are their mother's children.'
Elena Shavrova, with whom Anton had maintained a flirtatious tutorial relationship for six years, now lived in Petersburg as Mrs lust, an official's wife. The story she was writing was appropriately called 'Caesar's Wife' - her virtue had to be above suspicion. Anton, when she met him, seemed 'very unkind'. Kleopatra Karatygina begged Anton to put in a word for her with theatre managements or face 'hellish revenges Nos. One to Five'. As he caught the Moscow train, Anton replied, equally unkindly: 'As I am an absolute zero in the Maly Theatre, all five items of your hellish revenge acted on me more weakly than the bite of a paralysed mosquito.' At Suvorin's masked ball for Shrove-Tide, Lidia Avilova, dressed in a black domino costume, had, she claimed, more luck. She sought a response to the inscribed silver medallion she had anonymously sent Anton a year ago. Anton told her she would get her answer in autumn, on the day that The Seagull was performed on stage.5
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Lika Rediscovered February-March 1896 ANTON AND SUVORIN took sleeping compartments with two actresses in the latter's theatre, Aleksandra Nikitina and Zina Kholmskaia. When they arrived in Moscow on 14 February, the men took a room in the best hotel, the Slav Bazaar, and then went to a party, where Anton listened to a couple communicating ardently in code, a device he was to use five years later in Three Sisters. The actresses went home, but Anton was invited in two days' time to discuss, as Aleksandra Nikitina put it, 'this and this and this.'
The next day Suvorin and Chekhov joined the throng of pilgrims at Tolstoy's Moscow house. Anton was all tact when Tolstoy began to discuss Resurrection. Tolstoy had already formed his opinion of Chekhov as a fine writer corrupted by medicine and free thinking. Chekhov noted in his diary: Tolstoy was irritable, made cutting remarks about decadents… Tolstoy's daughters Tatiana and Maria were… both telling fortunes and they asked me to pick cards, and I showed each of them an ace of spades, and that upset them… They are both extraordinarily likeable and their relationship with their father is touching. Suvorin weighed up with the Tolstoys the pros and cons of sudden or slow death; he noted: 'Death has been trying to get into their house. First the Countess was ill, now he is. He has kidney stones and he suffers terribly.' Anton had a happier impression. For Tatiana Tolstaia, however, there were consequences Anton never knew about: his visit generated a passion she soon felt compelled to repress.
After a Saturday in Serpukhov discussing school-building, Anton got back to Melikhovo early on Sunday 18 February and slept. He awoke to find that his father had a new initiative: the Melikhovo schoolteacher had been employed to paper the living room. Life for FEBRUARY-MARCH l8o6 Pavel, Evgenia and Masha had been snowbound and lonely. One parental letter to Misha and Olga was pathetic: We were deeply touched by your letter. In it are expressed all the feelings of hearts that love from the soul. In the twilight of our years such a letter is a great consolation. We spent Shrove Tide just the three of us, with Masha. We expected visitors from Moscow, but nobody came.6 For five days Natasha Lintvariova brought from the Ukraine loud laughter. Masha, back teaching in Moscow, came only for the weekends. Cousin Georgi had left with a consignment of books for Taganrog library. February was severe: two peasants were frozen to death. March gave no respite. The estate was under six feet of snow: no school could be built until spring. The Seagull awaited an indulgent censor and a daring director. The great prose work that was to fill Chekhov's mind that year was only germinating and he had not yet disinterred The Wood Demon for transformation into a viable play. In the evenings, trying to escape Pavel's ranting, Anton picked through the books he had bought, or had been given, to despatch to Taganrog library and, although his eyes tired by candlelight he became absorbed in fortuitous reading of an extraordinary variety of literature.