Chekhov rendered what medical assistance he could to Uncle Mitrofan, but he saw that the old man had not long to live. With his usual kindness, he encouraged and even made arrangements for his uncle's daughter Sasha, then studying dressmaking, to go to Moscow to complete her training. He was so bored in Taganrog, he said, that he had learned to take snuff, and after a stay of only six days he escaped by rail to Feodosiya.
Not even the pleasures of Suvorin's company at Feodosiya could hold Chekhov for long. The weather had turned cold and windy, and there were no stoves in Suvorin's large summer house. Since his coughing had intensified, Chekhov had become extremely susceptible to weather conditions. He sought the warmth of the sun like a lazzarone, and in his letters, now, Egypt and Africa were countries that held a magic charm for him. After several days he left for Yalta, and there received the news of Uncle Mitrofan's passing. "I loved my deceased uncle with all my soul and I esteemed him," he wrote his cousin. (September 9, 1894.) Some of the pleasanter memories of his unhappy childhood were connected with this kindly, religious old man.
Chekhov soon left Yalta for Odessa, a gateway to Europe, — for he had a tentative arrangement with Suvorin to accompany him abroad. Something kept urging him on. Was it the half-joking promise he had made in March to see Lika if she failed to come to Melikhovo? On setting out for Taganrog he seems to have had no firm intention of continuing farther. In fact, he had writen Goltsev on September 4 that he would be back in Moscow in ten days. A feeling of opulence may have had something to do with his decision, for he had just received a fresh accounting from Suvorin's publishing firm that he owed in advances less than a thousand, with a large stock of his books on hand on which he had already paid his share of the printer's bill. "I'm rich," he jubilantly declared in a letter to Natalya Lintvareva. No doubt his search for the sun, as well as Suvorin's desire to go to Europe, helped him to overcome any wavering. In any event, on September 14 he left for abroad, his declared destination being Abbazia, a fashionable health resort on the Adriatic. At first, surprisingly enough, he did not inform his family, not even his closest confidant, sister Masha, who still imagined that he was at Feodosiya. And with a guilty conscience he confessed to himself that they would be hurt because his frequent journeys had caused them worry enough already.
Chekhov and Suvorin arrived at Vienna, by way of Lvov, on September 18 and he wrote Lika at once: "You stubbornly don't answer my letters,7 dear Lika, but I'll continue to annoy you by inflicting more of them on you. . . . Potapenko told me that you and Varya Eberle" would be in Switzerland. If this is so, write me exactly where in Switzerland so I can look you up. Of course, I'd be delighted to see you. Address: Abbazia, poste restante. ... I implore you, don't tell anyone in Russia that I'm abroad. I left secretly, like a thief. ... I'm not at all well. I have an almost continuous cough. Evidently I've let my health slip just as I did you."
From Abbazia, three days later, he wrote Lika again, a brief note to tell her that he could not stand the gray, rainy weather and would leave for Nice, and he gave her an address there. On the way to Nice he made brief stops at Trieste, Venice, Milan, and Genoa. At last the weather turned warm and his spirits rose. From Milan he finally wrote Masha, for he had become worried about whether she had enough money on hand for the family expenses and the interest payment to the bank on his loan. Rather self-consciously he recapitulated his itinerary since he left Russia and the things he had seen and done and bought: three silk ties at Venice and a piece of glass painted in the colors of paradise. He praised the excellent beer abroad which, he said, threatened to turn him into a drunkard, the musical comedy of Milan, and a staging of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment in which he had found Italian acting superior to Russian. And he was looking forward, he
Up to this point, in 1894, we have a record of only three letters of Chekhov to Lika. But others may have been lost.
Varya Eberle was a close friend of Lika and of the Chekhov family, and had jone abroad, like Lika, to continue her operatic studies.
wrote, to visiting the superb cemetery at Genoa, having already inspected a crematorium at Milan. "It is regrettable that they don't burn the living here, for instance, heretics who eat meat on Wednesdays." (September 22,1894.)
When Chekhov arrived in Nice on October 2, he found a number of Lika's letters from Switzerland which had been pursuing him through his various changes of address. At last he learned the details of her wretched situation. After reciting her fruitless pursuit of him, she confessed in one of her letters: "Then I . . . finally fell in love with Potapenko. What was there for me to do, Daddy? You always managed to escape and shove me off on someone else." The letters reflect her loneliness, and her fear for her future and that of her unborn child. "It is clear," she wrote on September 20, "that I'm condemned, that in the last analysis all whom I love will disdain me. That is why I want very much today to talk with you. I'm very, very unhappy. Don't laugh. Of the old Lika there remains not a trace, and whatever I may think, I can hardly say that it is all your fault!" Her one wish was to see him. "Hurry and let me know when you think of coming here, if you are thinking of it," she wrote him the next day. "I anticipate that you'll not be surprised by anything. If you don't fear to be disillusioned in your former Lika, then come. Of her, little remains. Yes, how these six months have overturned my whole life! . . . However, I don't think you will cast a stone at me. It seems to me that you were always indifferent to people, to their inadequacies and weaknesses."
Having read this sad parcel of news, Chekhov wrote his sister Masha that he was weary of traveling and that after a few days in Paris he would start for home. "I had counted on seeing Lika in Paris, but it now develops that she is in Switzerland. . . . Potapenko is a . . .9 and a cad." (October 2,1894.) Masha had some knowledge of the situation, for Lika had written her earlier from Paris to describe her unhappy existence — Potapenko stealing away daily from his wife and children there to hold secret meetings with her, and eventually abandoning his pregnant mistress to take his family to Italy.
Chekhov was plainly hurt by Lika's unjustifiable charge of his indifference to people; however "indifferent" he may have been to her ardent desire to win him for a husband, in any event he had been unwilling to play the part of a Potapenko in his relations with Lika.
9 In the published letter in the Soviet edition, the dots indicate the deletion of an unprintable word.
But one detects in his answer to her letters, on October 2, a suggestion of coldness, or better perhaps a desire to avoid personal involvement in her unhappy circumstances: "Unfortunately, I cannot go to Switzerland, for I'm with Suvorin, who must leave for Paris. I'll be in Nice from five to seven days, in Paris for two to three, and then on to Melikhovo. In Paris I'll be staying at the Grand Hotel.
"You ought not to have written about my indifference to people. Don't languish — be checrful, and take care of your health. I make you a low bow and firmly, firmly press your hand." He then adds a consoling postscript: "If I had only received your letter to Abbazia, I would have come to Nice by way of Switzerland and seen you, but now it would be inconvenient to drag Suvorin along."
His beautiful Lika remained abroad to have her baby alone, and Chekhov, after a few days in Paris, left for Moscow where he arrived on October 14. Did his conscience trouble him? There is some reason to suppose that it did. With a keen insight into his nature, Lika had pleaded in her letter of September 20: "Though all this is obscure, I think it is all clear to you. Not without reason are you a psychologist. At times it seemed that I would not be able to endure it any longer. But I have faith in you. . . „" Yet he failed to seek her out in her misery. Perhaps it was because he feared himself in such a confrontation, for he realized his weakness in the facc of human suffering and loneliness. Besides, Lika had been less than dignified in 'her repeated charges that he was partly to blame for her misfortune. His ambivalent feelings on this occasion may well have been corrcctly diagnosed by his sister Masha, who wrote in her reminiscences: "I do not know what was in my brother's mind; but it seems to me that he strove to overcome his feeling for Lika. In her were certain traits alien to him: a lack of character and a fondness for a bohemian existence. And what he once wrote her in a joking spirit perhaps ought to be regarded in all seriousness in the light of later events: 'A huge crocodile lives in you, Lika, and as a matter of fact I'm doing the wise thing in obeying common sense and not my heart, which you've bitten into.' "