378
APRIL-MAY 1896
… There were a lot of children. They were lifted up and saved over people's heads and shoulders. 'I haven't seen any gentry. It's just workmen and artisans lying there,' said a man about the suffocated… What bastards these police officials are, every one of them, and these bureaucrats. Suvorin returned to Moscow three days later, obsessed by Khodynka, meeting more eye-witnesses and public servants. On 30 May he left a third time for Moscow and invited Anton to the Hotel Dresden. Anton spent all day examining the children at Talezh school and joined Suvorin late at night. The next day was one of the most horrible in Anton's life, even for a man who had seen the prisons of Sakhalin. In west Moscow he stood on the site of a massacre. His diary is laconic: 'On 1 June we were at the Vagankovo cemetery and saw the graves of those who perished at Khodynka.' Suvorin's diary gives a more graphic account: Chekhov and I were at the Vagankovo cemetery a week after the catastrophe. The graves still smelt. The crosses were in rows, like soldiers on parade, mostly six-cornered, pine. A long pit \\.\A been dug and the coffins were placed next to each other. A beggar told us that the coffins were put on top of each other in three layers. The crosses are about four feet apart. The inscriptions are in pencil, about who is buried, sometimes with a comment: 'His life was i «; years and 6 months.' Or 'His life was 55 years.' 'Lord, accept his spirit in peace.' 'Those that suffered at Khodynka field.'… 'Thy grievous path of agony came on thee unawares, The Lord has liberated thee from all thy grief and cares.' The next day Anton went home to Melikhovo, while Suvorin went north, to his villa on the Volga at Maksatikha. Suvorin had, a fortnight later, nightmares of corpses. Anton said little about it, but Vagankovo cemetery and Khodynka affected him profoundly. He stopped writing for a fortnight after hearing the news of the disaster and did not begin work on 'My Life' again until 6 June. After his walk among the mass graves with Suvorin he did not write a letter for five days.
Khodynka swept Lika from Chekhov's mind. She sent a furious note, outraged that he had passed Podolsk on 30 May and not taken her with him to the Hotel Dresden: 'Very nice of you, Anton, to send a postcard and let me know that you've steamed past! The fact that you stayed in Suvorin's hotel room is of absolutely no interest to
«79
THE FLIGHT OF THE SEAGULL
me…' Anton alleged that he had never received her angry response, though it was neatly filed away in his archive at the end of the year, and pleaded with her 'to leave together for Moscow on the 15th or 16th and have dinner together.' This made Lika relent, and she agreed to meet him once again on the Moscow train. Again, Anton was not there, and she showered him with reproaches. She then received another invitation from Anton, who made it clear that a visit to the optician was the most pressing reason for him to travel to Moscow. Missed trains, like muddy roads, seemed sufficient cause for mutual affection to collapse again into reproaches and irony.
Lika replied angrily, and Chekhov put off his journey to Moscow by a day and arranged to meet Lika for lunch with Viktor Goltsev at Russian Thought. Now Viktor Goltsev was to play the same role in Anton's relations with Lika as Potapenko had, becoming a second string, just as Elena Shavrova was to Chekhov. Anton's next letter to Lika ended with a telling remark which applied to his relations with both women: 'I can't tie up and untie my affairs any more easily than I can tie a necktie.' The words 'tie up' and 'untie', zaviazyvat' and razviazyvat'connect Chekhov's love life to his writing: they also mean 'to devise a plot' and 'to devise the end of the plot'.
380
FIFTY-THREE
The Consecration of the School June-August 1896 ANTON SAW LIKA IN Moscow and also commissioned a bell tower for Melikhovo church; building was to begin once Talezh school was finished. He saw an optician who cured his headaches: Anton's short-sighted right eye had been strained by the long-sighted left: a pince-nez put the finishing touch to Anton's image. Other prescriptions, electric shocks, arsenic and sea-bathing, were ignored.
In July Elena Shavrova departed south for the summer and autumn, hurling an affectionate letter to Anton out of the Moscow-Kharkov mail train as it steamed through Lopasnia: Anton found her arch catch phrases Chi lo sa? and Fatalite irritating. He and Lika were for the time being in harmony: she came for five days to Melikhovo. No rival was in sight or in touch.
Summer visitors to Melikhovo spent their time out of doors: Ezhov came on a bicycle; the Konovitsers brought Dunia's brother, Dmitri, another pioneer cyclist. Olga Kundasova, again patient and assistant in Iakovenko's clinic, disturbed the peace. Depression made her look, Chekhov told Suvorin, 'as if she'd been a year in solitary confinement'. At the end of June Masha returned from the Lintvariovs and Evgenia came back from Moscow: the household ran smoothly. Misha and Olga stayed in the annexe where The Seagull had been written. There were only routine distractions: a neighbour's cows in Chekhov's woods; dysentery in a nearby village.
To his editor, Lugovoi,14 Chekhov sent the first third of 'My Life': 'a rough-hewn wooden structure which I'll plaster and paint when I finish the building'. Lugovoi liked the manuscript and tucked it away in Adolf Marx's fireproof safe. As well as Marx's generous fee came more bounty: Suvorin sent Anton a three-month railway pass. Anton paid his mortgage interest and dreamed of journeys. In Petersburg, however, his affairs were going less smoothly. The censors were
38i
Mil I l ê. è I in I HE SEAGULL baulking at The Seagull. Sazonova noted (3 June): 'Chekhov is melancholic. Suvorin too. The former is upset because of the play, the other is complaining of weakness and old age.' Potapenko, however, was optimistic, for the censor Litvinov, a crony of Suvorin's, was well disposed towards Chekhov. Unfortunately, Potapenko was not on the spot: Hotel Fassman. Dear Antonio! As you can see, I've ended up in Karlsbad, my aim being to rid my liver of stones etc., etc. A little bit of a problem with your Seagull. Contrary to all expectation, it has got caught in the nets of the censorship, but not badly, so it can be rescued. The whole trouble is that your decadent has a lax attitude to his mother's love life, which the censor's rules don't allow. You'll have to insert a scene from Hamlet: 'A bloody deed! almost as bad, good mother/As kill a king and marry with his brother.'… Actually, we'll get out of it more easily. Litvinov says the whole thing can be put right in 10 minutes. Potapenko wanted Anton to tour Germany with him and his friend - it would be cheap and, Potapenko swore by his liver, enjoyable -but Anton would never travel with Potapenko again. Potapenko did not get back to Petersburg and the censor until late July. By then Litvinov had returned the play to Chekhov with blue pencil marks where he wanted changes. Reluctantly, Chekhov made Treplev more indignant about his mother's liaison with Trigorin, and deleted a scene where Dr Dorn is revealed to be Masha Shamraeva's father. Potapenko belatedly took up the baton: I don't know what's happened to your Seagull. Have you done anything about it? Tomorrow I'll go and see Litvinov… There are rumours that literature is to be abolished; so we shan't need censors… Lavrov will have a stake put up him, Goltsev will have his tongue cut out. Anton was beginning to be cast down by the antagonism of Petersburg to his work. His mood was worsened by a letter from Isaak Levitan, in the throes of manic depression, staying in the appropriately named resort of Serdobol [Heartache] on the Gulf of Finland: The rocks here are smoothed by the ice age… Ages, the sense of the word is simply tragic… Billions of people have drowned and