Avilova visited the next day and brought him his proofs and some flowers. Although Chekhov's condition was reported as worse, the doctor, according to her memoirs, allowed her to visit. And now a lengthier conversation ensued —her husband had summoned her home (she showed Chekhov the three telegrams she had received) and she described the patient as pleading with her to remain at least one more
In this note Chekhov says that he arrived in Moscow on March 22 and also that he had spent two nights at Suvorin's hotel. These were probably "white lies" to cover in each case his failure to get in touch with her sooner. The diary of Chekhov's father dates his departure for Moscow on Friday, March 21.
In her memoirs she has Alexei ascertaining this information on March 24, which is consistent with her own garbled chronology, but Chekhov was not taken to the clinic until the day after.
The reference here is to the proofs of Peasants.
day and come and see him again. She refused, fearful that such a decision would forcc a showdown with her husband and compel her to confess her love for Chekhov. Avilova left the hospital depressed, accusing and justifying herself for her decision.
On March 28 Chekhov scribbled Lidiya Avilova a thank-you note, very similar to the many he wrote people who sent or brought him gifts during his illness: "Your flowers don't fade but become better all the time. My colleagues allow me to keep them on the table. You are kind, very kind, and I don't know how to thank you. . . ."
On the day of Avilova's sccond visit to the clinic, Chekhov's sister also callcd. "Anton Pavlovich lay on his back," Masha recorded in her reminisccnccs. "He was forbidden to talk. After having greeted him, to conceal my agitation I moved over to the tabic, on which lay a drawing of his lungs. They were sketched with a blue pencil, but the upper parts were filled in with red. I understood then that they were already diseased."
More interesting, as a sidelight on Avilova's account of her visits, is an entry in Leikin's diary for April 16: "L. A. Avilova relates that during her stay in Moscow . . . she learned that Chekhov was in Professor Ostroumov's clinic. She went there to visit him, but the doctor, although he allowed her to see Chekhov, would not permit her to talk with him. Speaking to him was forbidden, and he lay on his back in bed, not stirring."
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Chekhov's immediate concern, upon entering the Moscow clinic, was to keep the seriousness of his illness from his parents, and he warned his sister and brothers and intimate family friends on this scorc. The doctors diagnosed tuberculosis in the upper part of the lungs and prescribed a change in his way of life. "I understand their diagnosis," he wrote Suvorin, "but not their prescription, which is just about impossible. I have been definitely ordered to live in the country, but living permanently in the country involves continual trouble with peasants, animals, with elementary forces of all kinds, and to protect oneself from worries and anxieties in the country is as difficult as to escape burning in hell. Still I shall try to changc my life as much as possible, and through Masha I have already announced that I shall give up mcdical practice in the country. For mc this will be both a relief and a great deprivation. I shall drop all my district responsibilities, shall buy a dressing gown, warm my bones in the sun, and eat a lot. They tell me to eat six times a day and are indignant because I eat so very little. I'm forbidden to talk much, to swim, and so on and so on." (April 1, 1897.)
His behavior in the clinic, however, was a poor augury of his determination to abide by the prescriptions of the doctors. On his third day there, when Chekhov was still extremely weak, Tolstoy barged in, undoubtedly encountering no protests from the awestruck nurses and physicians. The modest patient was touched and impressed by this show of concern on the part of the great man. Unfortunately it was not in Tolstoy's nature to restrict himself to a brief stay or to the usual small talk of a hospital visit. He launched forth on a discussion of immortality, in which he maintained that humans and animals will continue to live on in a form of mind or love, the essence and purpose of which will remain a mystery to man. To Chekhov, who found it difficult to talk at all, this conception of immortality represented a kind of formless, jellylike mass with which he would be expected to fuse his individuality, his ego and consciousness. "Such immortality," he later wrote his friend Menshikov, in giving an account of the visit, "I don't need and I do not understand, and Tolstoy was surprised that I did not understand it." (April 16,1897.)
Since the suffering and exhausted Chekhov offered little or no argument, Tolstoy, now possessed by one of his instructional moods, felt encouraged to introduce the subject of art. He had abandoned Resurrection, he declared, and had read sixty volumes to prepare himself to write a treatise on art, the substance of which he next proceeded to expound. "His thinking about it is not new," Chekhov wrote Ertel several weeks after this meeting; "all the wise men in every age have sung this song in a variety of tunes. Old men have always tended to see the end of the world and have said that morality has fallen to its ne plus ultra, that art has degenerated and grown tawdry, that people have become puny, and so on and so forth. In his book Tolstoy wants to prove that art has now entered its final phase and is in a blind alley from which there is no outlet except retreat." (April ij, 1897.) Tolstoy finally departed, leaving Chekhov in an agitated state. Late that night he suffered a relapse accompanied again by a hemorrhage.
As he regained strength, Chekhov's good spirits returned and he slipped easily into his customary activities. The author of Ward No. 6, he quipped, had been moved into Ward No. 14, a spacious room with lighting effects that reminded him of one of Potapenko's garish plays.
Cheerful notes were dispatched to Elena Shavrova for a roast turkey instead of the cold bouillon they were serving him, to Shekhtel to suggest a bottle of wine, and to Goltsev to thank him for the half-pound of caviar. "People come and go, bring flowers, candy, good things to eat. In a word, bliss," he wrote Suvorin. (April 1,1897.)
Soon he was busying himself about his usual cares, such as arranging for a doctor to see his ailing friend Semashko and writing a letter to one of the village teachers to warn him that bricks for the new school would be delivered and to be sure someone was on hand to receive them. When Leontiev-Shcheglov visited he noticed Chekhov's sickroom table piled with manuscript. A Moscow young lady, studying to be a schoolteacher, had sent him her stories to read. He read them, and quite critically. She angrily sent a letter to the clinic, declaring that she had expected "more heart and greatness of soul" from him. Patiently he answered that if she wished to be an author she must learn how to write correctly, and he rather pathetically concluded by observing that it was difficult for him to write while lying in bed. Early in his illness he had written A. S. Yakovlev, the senator's son he had tutored years ago — they had recently renewed their acquaintance when, as one of a Moscow group of amateur actors, he had come to Serpukhov to stage a performance on behalf of the Novoselki school. Now Chekhov wanted him to visit the clinic so they could talk over a second performance to raise money, in which he himself would assume responsibility for the properties and stage design. Yakovlev came, but he was more interested in asking Chekhov to place a story for him in New Times. Chekhov recommended it to Suvorin, and also wrote the author a letter which contained criticism of the tale and a warning that a single good story, written over the course of a year, would not make an author of him any more than a single nail hammered into a wall would make a carpenter.8