A week after finishing Three Years, Chekhov informed Masha, who was spending Christmas with the Lintvarevs, that the house was full of guests. He also mentioned that he had received a letter from Lika, who wrote: "It will soon be two months since I've been in Paris and not a word from you. Is it possible that you've turned against me? . . . Without you I feci entirely forgotten and rejected! I'd give half my life to be at Melikhovo, to sit on your divan, to talk with you for ten minutes,
10 The censor cut out some of the sentiments regarding religion in the story. "This kills every desire to write freely," Chekhov informed Suvorin. "As you write you feel as though a bone were sticking in your throat." (January 19, 1895.) to dine, and in general to live as though this whole year had never existed, that I had never left Russia, and that all was as of old!"
The child that Lika had given birth to in Europe was her only comfort. But shortly after her return to Russia, this little girl died. It seemed to Lika that she had nothing left to live for. Her lover Potapenko thought it advisable to settle with his family in distant Petersburg. Chekhov saw him briefly in Moscow at the end of December, 1894, and somehow he found no difficulty in continuing his friendly relations with the "cad." In fact, together they bought and presented a silver cigarette case as a Christmas present to their mutual friend "Granddaddy" Sablin. But by now Chekhov had become conversant with all the sad details of the wretched Lika-Potapenko romance. Here was the stuff of drama, and Chekhov had a play on his mind.
chapter xv
"Man Will Become Better Only When You Make Him See What He Is Like"
The family had finished supper. It was a cold January night in 1895. Suddenly the dogs barked outside. A knock at the door. Masha went, followed by Chekhov. In the circle of light made by the open door stood Tatyana Shchepkina-Kupernik. Someone lurked hesitantly in the shadow — the artist Levitan. For more than two years he had refused to see Chekhov because of the belief that his friend had portrayed him in the character of the lecherous artist in The Grasshopper. For a moment the two now faced each other in silence, then warmly shook hands and began to talk about the trip to Melikhovo as though nothing had ever happened. What Levitan did not know was that after several futile attempts previously at a reconciliation, Chekhov had persuaded Tatyana to coax the artist into accompanying her on a visit to Melikhovo. For Chekhov, an old friend was always better than two new ones.
"I returned to what has been precious, to what in fact had never ceased to be precious," the temperamental Levitan wrote Chekhov after this renewal of their friendship. Again they began to see each other at regular intervals. Chekhov liked to visit Levitan's studio in Moscow to view his work in progress. The poetry of paint seemed to complement wonderfully the poetry of words in the Russian landscapes that both artists loved to portray. Although Chekhov regarded Levitan as easily the best Russian landscape painter, one who had the divine gift of hearing the mysterious voices of nature, he now began to detect the loss of something he had valued most highly in his canvases. "He is no longer painting youthfully, but with bravura," Chekhov wrote Suvorin. "I think women have exhausted him. The dear creatures give love and take from man just a trifle: his youth. It is impossible to paint a landscape without pathos, without ecstasy, and ecstasy is impossible when one has gorged oneself. If I were a landscape artist, I would lead almost an ascetic life; I would have intercourse once a year and eat once a day." (January 19,1895.)
But Levitan was an epicurean whose excesses sometimes terminated in fits of melancholy and suicidal tendencies. Perhaps Chekhov was not inordinately surprised to receive a letter, in July of this year, from Levitan's latest conquest, a wealthy lady by the name of A. N. Turchaninova, informing him that the artist, then staying at her estate, had wounded himself in an attempt to commit suicide. She pleaded with Chekhov to come, as a close friend of Levitan rather than as a physician, to help him recover from his mood of deep depression. As it turned out, it was the rivalry between a mother and daughter for the artist's affections which had somewhat unhinged him. Chekhov set out for the estate in the Novgorod province. He found Levitan with a superficial scalp wound caused by a bullet and remained with him for five days in an effort to alleviate his low spirits. Apparently he succeeded, for not long after his departure Levitan wrote him: "I don't know why, but those few days which you spent with me were the most restful of the whole summer."
Fact and fiction bearing on The Sea Gull, which Chekhov would soon write, have emerged from this friendly mission. Misha traces the incident of the slain bird in the play to one which, he says, his brother told him in connection with this visit: after an altercation in the house, Levitan tore the bandage from his head, grabbed his gun, and left. When he returned, he threw at the feet of his lady a sea gull he had shot. Another version of this incident is that Levitan placed at the feet of Chekhov's sister a gull which he had needlessly destroyed and vowed never to do so again. Since4there is no substantiation for these stories, it is also possible that the actual experience of Levitan's wounding a woodcock, when out hunting with Chekhov, inspired the scene in the play. Although Chekhov found the Turchaninova estate, situated on a large lake, sad, swampy, and unpleasant, there is good reason to suppose that this house and lake were in his mind when he created the famous setting for The Sea Gull.1
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Though Chekhov had assured Fausek in Yalta that he did not draw his characters from life, many of them, like Levitan, have been identified as people among his numerous circle of friends and acquaintances, however much he transformed them by the alembic of his art. However, the popular contemporary belief that the able and attractive actress Lidiya Yavorskaya was the prototype for the heroine of Ariadne, a story which Chekhov wrote in the first half of 1895,2 appears to be a rather farfetched identification.
As one of the group of gay young ladies Chekhov made merry with on his trips to Moscow, Yavorskaya clearly attracted him, for a time at least. He made a point of attending the plays she acted in, and Shchepkina-Kupemik, another of the group, declares in her memoirs that Chekhov was interested in Yavorskaya and carried on a flirtation with her. And Leontiev-Shcheglov, in his diary, notes that Chekhov had a weakness for this actress. When Chekhov entered her drawing room, she would drop on her knee before him, and, mimicking the part she played in an Indian drama, would repeat her line: "My only one, my great one, my divine one . . ." Chekhov also mentions a letter in verse which she wrote him.
Moscow gossips were soon talking about a love affair. Lazarev- Gruzinsky, in his recollections of Chekhov, tells how he bumped into him one day as he was emerging from somewhere behind the scenes of the Korsh Theater, where Yavorskaya acted.
" 'Anton Pavlovich, what are you doing here?' I asked in surprise. 'I thought you were in Melikhovo. Ah, yes! I'd forgotten that you arc courting Yavorskaya!'