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During Chekhov's lengthy stay at Nice nearly every day was warm, sunny, and with little or no wind, a blessed state of affairs which he tirelessly reiterated in his letters. In this salubrious climate his health for a time seemed to improve, an advance which fed the optimism that goes with his disease and gave him a feeling of buoyancy and well-being. Unfortunately, it encouraged him to take liberties with the strict regimen imposed on him and to ignore the warning tickling in his throat.
The first signs of a recurrence of hemorrhage he took rather lightly. "My health is so fine," he wrote Elena Shavrova on October 29, "that I'm not aware of it. There are times when I cough up blood, but this: has no relation to the way I feel, and I frisk about like a calf they've not yet married. Oh, what a joy that I'm not married! What a comfort this is!"
Two days later, however, in a letter to Alexandra Khotyaintseva, he wrote a bit more frankly: "My health is so-so. . . . The day before yesterday an expectoration of blood, which had continued for three weeks, stopped — not a laughing matter! There was little blood but over a long time, yet I felt so splendidly that I ignored the blood and quite sincerely wrote home that I was entirely well. (Apropos, don't say anything there about my health.)"
The doctors, however, took the matter seriously. Besides insisting anew upon the usual dietary and physical regulations, they had him moved to the ground floor of the pension so he would not have to elimb stairs, and they ordered that he be indoors by sundown. But throughout November and December, despite the continuing fine weather, there were periods when for days Chekhov coughed up blood, although there was no severe hemorrhage as in Moscow. "Because of blood/' he wrote Suvorin on December 16, "I'm sitting at home, as though under arrest. . . . It is dull and sad for me to live all alone."
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In her memoirs (Chapter XV) Lidiya Avilova states that in October Chekhov wrote her: " 'I shall probably spend the whole winter abroad.' He also wrote: 'I feel fairly well in the morning and splendid in the evening.'" She avoided quoting the whole of this particular letter, a very interesting one, perhaps because in it he indicated that it was really an answer to one of hers and one which she had sent to Melikhovo — that is, she had not even been informed that he had gone abroad. And once again, he had forgotten her address and told her that he was sending his reply by way of Potapenko. "You complain," he answers, "that my heroes are gloomy. Alas, I am not at fault in this! It happens involuntarily, and when I write, it doesn't seem to me that I'm being gloomy; at any rate, I'm always in a good mood when I work. It has been observed that gloomy, melancholy people always write gaily and the writings of cheerful people are always depressing. And I'm a cheerful man; at least, I have lived the first thirty years of my life, as they say, at my ease." (October 6,1897.)
His next letter she quoted almost in full, for it offered praise, as well as criticism, of one of several stories she sent him: "Ah, Lidiya Alek- seevna, with what pleasure I read your Forgotten Letters. It is a fine, clever, and elegant thing. It is a little, bobtailed thing, but in it there is such a depth of art and talent that I do not understand why you don't continue in this manner." (November 3, 1897.) But the other tales, he points out, betray the hand of a beginner. She cannot economize; one story disappears completely under the debris of landscape; and she does not eliminate the superfluous from her sentences or feel the roughness of her phrasing.
If Avilova did not appreciate his criticism at first — she confessed in her memoirs — it gave her a push in the right direction, and she blamed herself if nothing came of it. "I was convinced Chekhov realized this," she concludes in a moment of unusual illumination, "and that his attitude toward me was different from what it had been. When I wrote liim, I felt that I was forcing myself on him, but I could not terminate our correspondence any more than I could commit suicide."
At the end of his October letter to Avilova, Chekhov wrote: "I'm doing nothing, I write nothing, and I have no desire to write" — a rather accurate description of his state of mind during the first few weeks at Nice as he enjoyed the novelty of his new abode and the glorious weather. He forgot literature, though that year the ninth and tenth printings of Motley Tales appeared, the tenth of In the Twilight, and the eleventh of Tales. Also Suvorin brought out another single volume consisting of the two long stories, My Life and Peasants. Controversy still raged in the reviews around Peasants, and that month, when he was elected to the Union to Aid Russian Writers and Scholars, some members at the open meeting tried to blackball him because of his radical views on the peasantry, an action which provoked an indignant entry in Suvorin's diary: "In truth, these gentlemen are asses, and they understand literature even less than swine understand oranges, yet these swine set themselves up as judges of a remarkable writerl" It is perhaps significant that at this time the government finally rejected Goltsev's request to publish a newspaper, with which he had associated Chekhov's name as editor, because of the dangerous revolutionary views of the applicant. Peasants and other tales were beginning to appear with increasing frequency, in translation, in French periodicals, and with elation he sent Masha the first remuneration he received in francs, to be preserved.
Somehow the fresh scenes and experiences of life abroad did not evoke a literary response from Chekhov. He viewed it all as in a movie, as something with which he could not identify himself. Later, when the Russian editor of Cosmopolis, a new magazine published in several languages, invited him to contribute a story on a theme of foreign life, he replied in terms very similar to those he had communicated to Fausek at Yalta several years previously: "In one of your letters you expressed a desire that I should send you an international tale, taking for my subject something from life here. Such a story I can write only in Russia, from memory. I am able to write only from memory and have never written directly from nature. I must let the subject filter through my memory until only what is important and typical in it remains in the filter." (December 15,1897.)
Chekhov, however, eventually grew conscience-stricken over the idleness of his Nice existence, and felt that he would have to return to
Russia if he could not get down to work. On October 9 he wrote Masha that he was taking advantage of a day of poor weather to sit in his room and concentrate on a story. Many themes, he lamented, were rusting in his brain — in his notebook he jotted down several of them, which were used later — for he found it extremely difficult to write in an alien land, in a strange room, and on a table he was not accustomed to. It was like sewing on somebody else's sewing machine. The heavy repletion he felt after the large pension meals also bothered him — an author, he decided, should write on an empty stomach. And his weak health was an additional obstacle. Kovalevsky recalls in his memoirs how Chekhov would desert his little group of loyal friends for a week at a time when he was writing. "And then he appeared again in our company, and not without sadness we observed the change in his features. He was pale and seemed worse than before. And during our walks together, he often fell silent, as though preoccupied with his own thoughts. At such times, he was probably dwelling upon a story he had undertaken."