The next day, however, we have positive evidence that Chekhov did visit Lidiya Avilova, and her absorbing account of it in her memoirs (Chapter VI) is like a clever scene from a comedy, but one with tragic overtones. She had carefully prepared everything for his arrival — first a visit to the nursery to make him jealous in watching the children being put to bed; next, tea in the dining room; then to the study, where it was cozy — and how much they would have to talk about! — finally, a supper with vodka, wine, beer, and fruit, all of which she had laid out. As she arranged it, the drawing room, with its large lamp dimmed, seemed to her to be pervaded by an appropriate atmosphere of gentle sadness.
Then the doorbell rang, but instead of Chekhov, friends of her husband, a married couple, bounced in. The wife was a roaring woman, aggressively opinionated, and she shouted with laughter at the slightest excuse. They pounced on the supper, devoured it, and stayed and stayed, until the anxious hostess gratefully concluded that it was at last too late for Chekhov to come. But to her mortification, he finally did. The roaring lady burst into laughter at the thought of meeting the famous author, and at once assailed him for wasting his time on silly little tales that proved nothing. Chekhov grew limp and silent. At a late hour, the husband at last dragged his argumentative wife away; Lidiya Avilova had only enough strength left to beg Chekhov, who also wished to leave, to remain a bit longer.
They talked about her writing, his criticism of it, and he reproved her for not following his directions about publishing her tales. Then she quotes Chekhov as saying: " 'You ought to be in bed; your visitors have worn you out. Today you're not the same as you were before. You seem indifferent and listless, and you'll be glad when I leave. Yes, before . . . Do you remember our first meetings? And do you know that I was seriously in love with you? It was serious. I loved you. It seemed that there was not another woman in the world whom I could love that way. You were beautiful and appealing, and there was such freshness and dazzling charm in your youthfulness! I loved you and thought only of you. And when I met you again after a long separation, it seemed to me that you had grown still more beautiful and that you were another, a new person, and that I must get to know you again and love you still more in a new way. And that it would be harder to part from you
As he spoke his eyes seemed to her cold and remorseless, and she had the impression that he was somehow angry with her for having changed and for no longer being desirable. And she continues to quote him: " 'I loved you,' Chekhov went on now, quite wrathfully, and he bent over me, staring angrily into my face. 'But I knew that you were not like many women whom I left and who broke with me; that the love one has for you must be pure and sacred and last all one's life.'"
Then suddenly observing that it was one-thirty in the morning, Chekhov said that there was still time for him to have supper with Suvorin and discuss things with him. Taking up a packet of her manuscripts which she had prepared for him, he remarked: " 'I think I promised to see you again tomorrow, but I'll not be able to do so. For I shall be leaving for Moscow tomorrow.5 That means that we shall not see each other again.' " And he left.
However accurately Lidiya Avilova may have recalled, over the years, what took place that evening, Chekhov's letter the next day, February 14, seems quite at variance with the passionate sentiments she attributed to him in her account and also with some of the facts she mentioned. Perhaps this is why she omitted the letter in her memoirs. Chekhov wrote: "You are wrong in saying that I was disgracefully bored at your place. I was not bored but somewhat depressed, because I could see from your face that your guests had tired you out. I wanted to have dinner with you, but yesterday you did not repeat the invitation and I again came to the conclusion that you were weary of visitors.
6 Actually, Chekhov did not leave for Moscow until three days later.
"I did not see Burenin today and I shall probably not be seeing him, because I intend to leave for the country tomorrow. I'm sending you my book and a thousand sincere wishes and blessings."6
From this simple, matter-of-fact communication, it would appear that Chekhov had gone to Lidiya Avilova's in response to a dinner invitation and much earlier in the day than she represents; had found guests there, and left because he thought her weary and because, in the circumstances, she did not urge him to remain for dinner. In her memoirs she tells him that she had gone to Burenin to seek his aid in placing her stories in New Times. Then she describes his reaction: "Chekhov jumped up. Even the tails of his coat flew up. 'What idiot sent you to that scoundrel?' he asked sternly without raising his voice, but the frown on his face surprised me." She explains to him that she was aware of the risk of an indecent proposal from Burenin in return for the favor of publishing her fiction. Pleased that Chekhov displayed anger over the risk she had undergone, she adds for clarification to the reader: "This is what is known as coquetry." Chekhov's letter, on the other hand, appears to indicate an actual agreement between them that he would use his influence on Burenin to publish her tales in New Times. In fact, a letter from Burenin to Chekhov, dated February 15, reveals clearly that he did manage to see Burenin before he left Petersburg and secured' from him a promise to publish one of the stories which Avilova had sent to New Times.
A second letter which Chekhov sent Avilova the next day she did reproduce in her memoirs (Chapter VII), for it served the purpose of her narrative.7 He had already read two of her stories, in manuscripts which he had taken away with him on the day of his visit. One he praised and the other he damned in forthright terms: . . It is not a story at all but a thing and a cumbrous thing at that." If by any chance she had been truthful about his expression of love for her that night, his passion in no sense assuaged the acerbity of his criticism of her as a
This letter was published for the first time in Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem A. P. Сhekhova (Complete Edition of the Works and Letters of A. P. Chekhov), Moscow, 1949, XVI, 214. As previously mentioned, this is one of the two letters which Avilova asked Chekhov's sister not to publish in her edition. This edition of the letters very likely provided Avilova with much of the factual information in her memoirs and perhaps some of the inspiration for Chekhov's conversation. And the contrived aspect of an incident in the memoirs is revealed when a letter such as this one, not in the edition she used, turns up later in print.
There are a few slight omissions, not indicated, in her version of the letter, but they do not significantly alter the meaning.
writer. "You are a talented person," he declared, "but you have grown heavy or, to put it vulgarly, you have become soggy and already belong to the category of stale writers. . . . You don't polish enough, indeed a woman writer ought not to write but to embroider on paper, for her work ought to be painstaking, slow." With the letter came her manuscripts, and a copy of his recent book, Stories and Tales, with the chilly inscription: "To L. A. Avilova from the author."