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will drown. We are Don-Quixotes… tell me in all honesty, it's stupid, isn't it!! Yours - what a senseless word - no, just Levitan. Anton's reply, if any, is not extant, but his own depression is clear in a letter he wrote to Aleksei Kiseliov: I live out my years as a bachelor, 'We pluck a day of love like a flower.' I can't drink more than three glasses of vodka. I've stopped smoking. He became restless. On 20 July, for the fourth time in seven months, Anton left Melikhovo to see Suvorin. He gave no reason for such a hasty trek. Suvorin's country house in Maksatikha, where the Mologa and the Volchina rivers meet, was reached by train to Iaroslavl and then river boat. Did Anton go for the fishing, or for counselling on his personal, theatrical or financial affairs? Had he intended to travel further north, to console Levitan? Petersburg was uninviting, for Alek-sandr had become demented after his drunken binge in Kiev, although he was writing articles on the care of the insane. He complained to Anton: 'The old woman Gaga is wasting away… I have an abscess between my cheek and my gum. We've got a puppy named Saltpetre, it messes.' Natalia's postscript asked why Chekhov had 'forgotten his poor relatives'.
On Anton's return to Melikhovo he found that Lika's behaviour changed. Neither affectionate nor angry, she wrote in a scrawl that betokened emotional disarray, heralding her arrival, hinting that she had found a new lover: 'Viktor Goltsev and I will come on Saturday for the consecration of the school. I'm not yet fully infected; when I kiss you I shan't infect you.'
The consecration of the school galvanized everyone. Anton spent a whole day at council meetings in Serpukhov. He could stand the formalities only because he was leaving next month to see Suvorin in the Crimea. He was besieged by mad patients. One of the Tolokonni-kovs, whose factories polluted the village of Ugriumovo [Sullen], kept a female relative on a chain to stop her abusive shrieking: for weeks Anton searched for a hospital to take her.15 On the eve of the consecration, a peasant showed violent melancholia con delirio.
Aleksandr did not come to the consecration: Dr Iakovenko and Olga Kundasova represented the mentally unstable. The occasion was SO alcoholic that guests were immobilized for two days at Melikhovo
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with hangovers. The servants made merry, except for Roman, whose baby son had died. The consecration was so moving that Chekhov transmuted it into an episode of 'My Life'. Even Pavel's thirst for ceremony was satisfied: 'The village elders offered the school governor bread and salt, an icon of the Redeemer and speeches of thanks. Cherevin the manager offered Masha a bouquet. Girl choristers sang May you live many years' Chekhov himself made a rare diary entry: 4 August. The peasants from Talezh, Bershovo, Dubechnia and Shiolkovo offered me four loaves, an icon, two silver salt cellars. The peasant Postnov from Shiolkovo made a speech. Next came the consecration of the bell tower. (Anton had the church painted orange.)
'My Life' was sent to The Cornfield - Til put the sweetening in and polish it up in proof form,' he told Lugovoi. He sent the last draft of The Seagull for Potapenko to take over the next hurdle. The Moscow News of the Day was advertising the play - 'Chekhov's Seagull flies towards us,/ Fly, my darling, fly to us/ To our deserted shores!' wrote the poetaster Lolo Munshtein. Anton cringed. It was time to leave.
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FIFTY-FOUR
Night on a Bare Mountain August-September 1896 ANTON WANTED to make the best use of the rail pass Suvorin had given him. He decided first to visit Taganrog, and end up in Feodosia with Suvorin, but was vague about the itinerary. He told only his sister that he would go to Kislovodsk, a spa in the north Caucasus. He teased Potapenko: 'I'll be in Feodosia, I'll make ë pass at your first wife' - for Potapenko, saddled with alimony, wanted a pretext for divorce. Potapenko could not, however, fathom Anton's motives; 'What mad idea to go to Feodosia? It's utter horror! Do you really want to write a novel about the life of cretins!… I hear you have some convict's travel warrant.' On 23 August 1896, a lew days after Anton left, Potapenko wrote to him about the The Seagull, literary adventures and liver stones. He began: 'And where you've vanished to, nobody knows. You gave me a Feodosia address, but I think you've gone to the Caucasus.' The frankest of men, Potapenko suspected from Anton's evasions that he had abducted Lika.
Three clues might point to a journey with Lika. Firstly, the route that Chekhov took was one that Lika had proposed for a journey four years ago. Secondly, Lika vanished at the same time as Chekhov. Thirdly, Lika's letters that autumn would suggest that Anton had promised her marriage exactly a year after his arrival in the spa of Kislovodsk. Yet would Anton, who valued privacy so much, have provoked gossip by taking a woman as attractive and alluring as Lika to his birthplace and then to a fashionable mountain spa? And does a promise of 'mutual bliss', as Anton had put it, have to be sealed with a preliminary honeymoon? In any case, would Lika have gone to Feodosia? She knew that Suvorin advised Anton not to marry her, and panicked at the thought of meeting him.
Where did Lika vanish to? On 19 August Chekhov left Melikhovo with Lika and her friend Varia Eberle for Moscow, where Anton
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would catch the express train south. Even Granny Ioganson was nonplussed. She had no news of Lika until 5 September, after which Lika reappeared in Podolsk, between Melikhovo and Moscow: 5 September: They've brought Christina and the nanny. 6 September: How could Lika send [the baby's] things off in such a rush? Now the child has no clean linen, it's terribly annoying. 16 September: Lika still hasn't moved from Podolsk, I am so disappointed, as I expected to see her in Pokrovskoe tomorrow.16 Nobody in Kislovodsk or Taganrog saw Lika; Anton spent his time in both places with male friends. If Lika disappeared with any man, it was probably not Anton, but Viktor Goltsev. Maybe the date, 1 September 1897, for 'mutual bliss' was set before Anton's departure south, or after his return.17
Anton spent a day or two in Taganrog, seeing cousins and the library, avoiding admirers. He wrote no letters from his birthplace, and almost nothing until his holiday ended. He sent instructions: Masha was to buy timber for a new school at Novosiolki, Potapenko was to act for The Seagull. His diary is terse: In Rostov I had supper with my old schoolmate, Lev Volkenshtein… At General Safonov's funeral in Kislovodsk I met A. I. Chuprov, then A. N. Veselovsky in the park.'8 On the 28th went hunting with Baron Steingel, spending the night on Mt Bermamyt; cold and a very strong wind… To cousin George in Taganrog Chekhov revealed only that he had met friends in Kislovodsk 'as idle as himself.' Kleopatra Karatygina recalls stumbling on Anton in Kislovodsk: hot and irritable, he was cajoled into posing for a photograph. Anton found relief from the heat by going on a boar hunt on Mount Bermamyt with a man who should have known better, his colleague Dr Obolonsky, who was next to appear in Anton's life when catastrophe struck. Mount Bermamyt is a remarkable place for climbers and hunters, but no careful doctor would let a tubercular patient spend a night there. The guide books of the time warned: 8559 ft above sea level, 20 miles from Kislovodsk… Bermamyt is a virtually bare rock usually swept by winds blowing off Mt Elbrus. There are ruins of a Tatar village, but no protection from rain and