According to her memoirs, Chekhov's letter left her a prey to mixed emotions. She was convinced of her deep love for Chekhov and at the same time she was profoundly uncertain whether either of them was prepared, in the light of the circumstances conditioning their personal lives, to make the necessary sacrificcs to consummate such a love. She tells how she finally came to a decision. Ordering a watch-chain pendant, in the form of a book, from a jeweler, she had it engraved on one side: "Stories and Tales. Works of An. Chekhov," and on the other: "Page 267, lines 6 and 7." 1Ъе reference was to a sentence in his tale, The Neighbors: "If you ever want my life, come and take it." She sent the pendant to her brother in Moscow, with instructions to leave it at the editorial office of Russian Thought to be picked up by Chekhov. Lidiya Avilova then relates how she spent many days in Petersburg in a state of agitation and alarm, waiting for some reaction from Chekhov to her odd gift, and she concludes this section of her memoirs: "There could be no doubt that Anton Pavlovich received my pendant, but there was no response, and even our correspondence was broken off. I would have to live without him."
Other evidence, however, tends to disprove Avilova's assertion that at this juncture she waited impatiently in Petersburg for an answer and ceased to write Chekhov. For in the recently published diary of Leikin, already mentioned, there is an entry dated March 7, 1895: "This morning I arrived in Moscow. . . . The dilettante writer Lidiya Aleksecvna Avilova is in Moscow. She left Petersburg last week. . . ." Clearly Avilova had left for Moscow less than two weeks after Chekhov had returned to that city from Petersburg, and only a few days after sending him the pendant.
On March 9 Leikin makes another entry in his diary: "... I drank tea with her [L. A. Avilova]. She is grieving: ten days ago she wrote from Moscow to Chekhov's estate and invited him to Moscow, but he has neither come nor answered her. She asked at Russian Thought whether he was at his estate, and they told her that he had gone to
Taganrog. But I reported to her that at Russian Thought they informed me he was at his estate, expected me, and I'm going to him tomorrow. How wretched she was. Chekhov is now in the country, he works, writes, and cannot waste time going to Moscow. That is why he asked the people at Russian Thought to tell all his female admirers (and Avilova among them) that he had gone to Taganrog."
This is the plain vanilla of "romance," the obtrusive reality that so unkindly denigrates the beautiful sentiment which Lidiya Avilova, in her memoirs, had Chekhov pronounce on her behalf less than a month previously: "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."
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Leikin arrived at Melikhovo on March 10 in a fierce blizzard, bringing Yezhov and Lazarev-Gruzinsky with him. Icicles had formed on Leikin's beard and the visitors were covered with snow and half-frozen from the sleigh ride from Lopasnya station. Chekhov greeted them joyfully at the door and two servants, chunky girls with faces round as moons, took their bags. Vodka warmed the chillcd bodies of the guests, and they and the family sat down to dinner in good spirits. Leikin was delighted to see the full-grown Bromine and Quinine, the dachshunds he had sent as puppies to Chekhov. That year they were mated; one of the puppies died, the other, which Chekhov named Saltpeter, he gave to a neighbor. After dinner, since the storm had ceased, the host showed the visitors around his property.
Chekhov's former proteges, Yezhov and Lazarev-Gruzinsky, struck him now as two young blockheads whose taciturnity spread a desperate boredom throughout the house. Leikin's chatter, however, made up for it, but if he said anything about Lidiya Avilova's languishing in Moscow it went unrecorded. Chekhov thought this tremendously prolific author and editor, who had given him his first real start in writing, had grown flabby but kinder and better-natured. He was amused at his mother's story of asking the local butcher for a good piece of meat for her guest Mr. Leikin. "Is that the one who writes books?" he asked, and he eagerly supplied a good cut. He wrote books, too, grumbled Chekhov, but the butcher sent him only gristle.
The account of this visit in Leikin's diary stresses his pleased amazement over Melikhovo, now a simple but attractively decorated house with bright rooms and comforts that could not be found even in Moscow apartments. And as a self-made man, it gave him obvious pleasure to compare the poverty of this family, when he first began to know them ten years before, to the relative well-being it now enjoyed.
They were indeed doing well. Though at times Chekhov got annoyed with Misha —who, he thought, suffered from tactlessness and a painful consciousness of his own mistakes — he did not hesitate to urge Suvorin to use his influence in government circles to secure a promotion for his brother. And that year Misha was transferred from Uglich to Yaroslavl as head of a division in the city government. At the same time Misha, in his ambitions to be a writer, was achieving some success in publishing children's stories. Masha, in her spare time, continued her painting and was taking a special medical course so that she might better help Chekhov in his practice. And Ivan's reputation as a pedagogue in the Moscow school system was growing and had won for him another official medal. Even the maverick Alexander had by now begun to reap some of the rewards of his unquestioned talents. His journalistic and editorial skills had won him respect on New Times and in other newspaper and magazine circles in Petersburg. He could now afford a dacha for his family in the summer, and he informed Chekhov that he had opened a savings account. However, he still mercilessly made a kind of accomplice of his brother in his pursuit of literary honors by continually asking him to criticize his stories and to use his influence in getting them placed in leading magazines. Chekhov pointedly informed him that he was arranging his papers and correspondence, and after debating with himself whether to place Alexander under "family" or "writer," had decided to compromise by putting him in the category of "petitioners." Alexander's tales, under the pseudonym of A. Sedoi, were beginning to attract some attention. When Chekhov, his severest critic, wrote him nearly unqualified praise of one of his stories, there was something almost pathetic in Alexander's rapture over this rare accolade from his famous brother. In 1895 appeared a new printing of Alexander's collection, Christmas Tales, which had been achieved, he innocently informed Chekhov, by binding up the nine hundred unsold copies and advertising them as a second edition. That year he was accorded the distinction of an invitation to one of the exclusive Petersburg literary dinners, which Chekhov had initiated several years before. Alexander pronounced the affair quite boring and then registered a complaint that Leikin, in his account of the dinner in the Petersburg Gazette, had eliminated his name in listing those who were present.
In his reflective moods Chekhov did not consider himself among those members of the family who were doing well. "I'm growing old," he wrote Bilibin, his friend from the days when he published in Fragments. "No money. No orders. No ranks. There are only debts." (January 18, 1895.) When he had money, he confessed to Suvorin, he felt a bit drunk and could not help spending it on all sorts of rubbish. He had squandered it heedlessly on a new bath house, Russian style, a large barn, Ukrainian style, a firehouse for the village of Melikhovo with a glorious bell; and now he planned to build a new schoolhouse for the village of Talezh, where his trustee duties compelled him occasionally to examine the students. If young cousin Volodya — a son of the late Uncle Mitrofan — would only go to a Medical School, Chekhov offered to guarantee him a small monthly stipend. Fortunately Volodya elected to go to a free seminary.8