While at Yalta, however, Chekhov received a letter from Lika from Berlin, the tone of which patently suggested that something had gone radically wrong in her affair. "I should like to reach my destination as soon as possible," she wrote, "and I also want to look around Berlin, for I'll soon die and will see nothing more." This from his beautiful Lika, who in her letter said that she had been "twice rejected" by him, and of whose deep feeling for him he could have no doubt.2
However, Chekhov could not have been aware of the seriousness of her plight at this point, and he preferred to answer her dark hint with one of his typical serio-comic letters which she knew so welclass="underline" "Though you frighten me in your letter by saying that you are going to die soon, and you twit me with having thrown you over, thanks anyway. I know perfectly well that you are not going to die and that no one has thrown you over." He then launches into a light, amusing account of his doings at Yalta: helping the local aristocracy with their rehearsals of Faust; eating lamb fried in deep fat, onion fritters, and mutton chops in the company of the mistress of a girls' school, and writing endlessly. When she becomes a great singer and makes enormous sums, marry him, he begs her, so that he'll be able to live without working. And he con- eludes by urging her to take a quick trip back to Russia in June to visit him at Melikhovo. Following up a disarmingly casual comment in her letter, he writes: "You run into Potapenko occasionally. He'll also be returning to Russia this summer. If you make the trip with him, it will cost less. Let him buy your ticket and forget to pay him (you
2 Besides the indications of her love for him in Lika's letters, Chekhov's sister, not long before her brother's death, told I. A. Bunin that Lika had been in love with Chekhov. See I. A. Bunin, О Chekhove (Concerning Chekhov), New York, 1955, pp. 66-67.
won't be the first). But if you won't make the trip, I'll go to Paris." (March 27,1894.)
Actually Chekhov's health did not improve much at Yalta despite the sea air and lovely weather. After barely a month, the town seemed terribly dull to him. He could think of nothing but Melikhovo, and besides his money was running out. A few days before he left, on April 3, he wrote an interesting letter to Suvorin, in which he once again struck out against the Tolstoyan morality which had for so long shadowed his thoughts. "From childhood," he declared, "I have believed in progress and cannot help believing. ... I liked intelligent people, sensibility, courtesy, wit, and was as indifferent to people's picking their corns, and having their leg wrappings emit a stench, as to young ladies who walk around in the morning with their hair done up in curl papers. But Tolstoyan philosophy had a powerful effect on me, governed my life for a period of six or seven years; it was not the basic premises, which had been known to me earlier, that acted on me, but the Tolstoyan manner of expression, its good sense, and probably a sort of hypnotic quality. Now something within me protests; prudence and justice tell me that in electricity and steam there is more love for man than in chastity and in abstinence from meat. War is evil and the court system is evil, but it docs not therefore follow that I must go around in bast shoes and sleep on the stove along with the worker and his wife, etc., etc. This, however, is not the crux of the matter, not the 'for' and 'against'; it is that somehow or other Tolstoy has already passed out of my life, is no longer in my soul, and has left me, saying: 'I leave this
your house empty.' I am free from this tenant." (March 27, 1894.)
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For a time the familiar summer life at Melikhovo exercised its usual charm on Chekhov. He made new paths, planted flowers, chopped down dead trees, and chased the hens and dogs out of the garden. The fragrance of freshly cut hay intoxicated him. One had only to sit beside a haystack for a couple of hours, he wrote Lcontiev-Shchcglov, "in order to imagine oneself in the embraces of a naked woman." (July 5, 1894.) Nearness to nature and idleness, he decided, were the necessary elements of happiness.
A new project absorbed him —building a small lodge in the berry bushes beyond his cherry orchard to take care of the overflow of guests.
He would have the men sleep there and the women in the main house. However, when it was finished he called it a "doll house." For with his slender means he could afford only two rooms and an attic and a porch, all adomed with a gingerbread design. The view from the porch of the flowering cherry and apple trees was lovely, but in the winter one had to dig a trench through the snow —often the height of a man — to approach the Lodge. Eventually he formed the habit of retreating to it to escape his guests when he wanted to write. The Lodge became his "spiritual oven," and it was there that he wrote The Sea Gull.
That summer, in recognition of his civic activities, Chekhov was chosen a member of the Serpukhov Zemstvo (County Council) for three years, and he was also appointed to the executive committee of the local charitable society. And with a large group of rural doctors he participated in a tour of inspection at a district insane asylum. The place provided material for alienists rather than psychologists, he remarked, in describing one of the inmates who assured him that Russia would come to ruin if it did not recognize the divinity of the Metropolitan of Kiev.
Sunburned from his work outdoors and with a few more pounds added to his frame, Chekhov enjoyed the illusion of returning health. But while strolling with a neighbor one day, something seemed to snap in his chest, and he experienced a feeling of suffocation and a ringing in the ears. He walked toward the porch, where visitors were sitting, and all he could think of was how awkward it would be to fall down before these people and die. After drinking some water and taking a brief rest, he recovered. However, the significance of his "palpitations of the heart," which he had been mentioning to friends for some time, now stalked his mind.
Grim warnings such as this activated the discontent which seemed always to be a definite part of Chekhov's experience of happiness. He had hardly begun to enjoy the pleasures of Melikhovo that summer when he began pressing Suvorin to take a trip with him. First it was down the Volga to visit old monasteries and graveyards, which had a fascination for both of them. Then he suggested a trip down the Don — or the Dnieper — or, if he wished, to Feodosiya — or to Switzerland. In fact, he was willing to go almost anywhere if only Suvorin would agree. In justification he wrote him: "About ten years ago I was concerned with spiritualism, and Turgenev, whose spirit I evoked, said to me: 'Your life is nearing its decline.'3 And in very fact I keenly want every sort of thing just as though it was the last meal before a fast. I seem to have tried everything. . . . But some inner force, like a presentiment, urges me on to make haste. Perhaps it is not a presentiment, but simply regret that life flows on so monotonously and tamely. A protest of the soul, one might say." (July 11, 1894.)
Suvorin failed him, however, and Chekhov seized upon Potapenko, who had returned from abroad, without Lika and quite uncommunicative about her. At the beginning they set out on a trip down the Volga. But they got only as far as Nizhny Novgorod when they met P. A. Sergeenko, Chekhov's old Taganrog schoolfellow and devoted admirer. In his memoirs Potapenko writes that the fear of having this chattering, boasting, and spiritually empty Tolstoyan on their hands caused Chekhov impulsively to change his plans. For, explains Potapenko, Chekhov was unable to be anything other than polite and friendly, for he felt that he must respond to whatever was good in people. Chekhov put it a bit differently in his explanation to Suvorin — the heat, the dry wind, the noise of the fair they were observing, and the conversation of Sergeenko suddenly made him feel so suffocated, so ill at ease, and so sick that he fled ignominiously to the railway station and returned to Moscow with Potapenko. Ashamed to go back to Melikhovo after such a brief time away, they decided to visit the Lintvarevs on the Psyol, where Chekhov's sister had spent a brief vacation earlier that summer. It turned out to be a happy choice.