Before going further with the plans, he waited for a promised visit from Masha, who would have to pass on everything relating to the building of the house. She arrived at Yalta for a week at the end of October. Chekhov was surprised to learn from her that their mother wished to keep on living at Melikhovo. This desire did not discourage him, although it seriously upset his financial calculation. However, he believed that he could persuade his mother to live with him most of the year at Yalta and they would occupy Melikhovo in the summer.
When he took Masha to inspect the site of the future house, she could not conceal her chagrin. It was too far from the sea, she thought. An old ragged vineyard overgrown with weeds . . . not a tree or a bush on the plot . . . and hard by a Tatar graveyard where, as though staged for their benefit, a funeral was taking place . . . Her unconcealed disappointment vexed Chekhov and she quickly tried to make amends. She praised the view — the sea in the distance, the breakwater with ships anchored in the port, and the background of mountains. Soon they were sitting down together with paper and pencil, happily blocking out the locations for the house, for the garden, grottoes, fountains. . . .
If he had any notion of playing the part of the architect for the new house, Masha apparently discouraged it, if for no other reason than the strain it would place upon him. While she was there Chekhov met, at Sinani's bookshop, L. N. Shapovalov, a young architect fresh from Moscow. This shy young man was overwhelmed by an introduction to the great writer, but after a brief acquaintance Chekhov invited him to be his architect. Shapovalov was overcome by doubts as to whether he could build a house where so famous an author could live and work. However, Chekhov calmed his fears and said that he had in mind only a simple, modest, comfortable structure. The eager architect promptly drew up preliminary plans, which Chekhov and Masha went over in detail, and a bargain was struck.
After Masha's departure, Chekhov's letters home were full of enthusiastic accounts of the house, the construction of which had begun: the view was unexampled and he had already been offered four times as much as he had paid for the land, which was large enough to support an orchard and a vegetable and flower garden. Friends were already showering him with gifts of trees and flowering bushes. But most of the virtues he stressed were clearly designed to convince his mother how desirable living would be in this new house at Yalta, a town which would remind her of Taganrog, he declared. Everything will be under one roof, he explained, and the coal and wood will be in the cellar. The kitchen will be splendid, with American conveniences and running water, and there will be a drying room, pushbells for servants, and a telephone. Hens there laid all the year round, coffee was inexpensive, and there were a bakery shop, a market, and a coachman nearby who could be hired cheaply. Further, the church in Autka had a ten-o'clock Mass —his mother's favorite time —and she could gather mushrooms all through the autumn in the Crown woods.
In the midst of these panegyrics on the advantages of Autka and the new house, Masha was no doubt quite shaken to hear from her brother, on December 8, that he was "the owner of one of the most beautiful and curious estates in the Crimea!" Chekhov could not resist the charm that had appealed so much to his artistic soul — he had bought the little house at Kuchukoi, and the land that went with it. But she must not tell anyone except the family, he self-consciously warned, for he was afraid it would get in the paper that he had squandered a hundred thousand on the place.
Apparently Masha did express some wonderment at her brother's extravagance — she had had to take a somewhat larger apartment in Moscow so that her grieving mother could stay with her for a time. Hurt, Chekhov at once replied: "If, as you say in your last, it is now necessary to sell Melikhovo, then it is not because I've been piling up debts at Yalta. My financial affairs are not exactly brilliant, true, but there is a way out." Then he gives a detailed accounting of his dealings on both houses. He had accumulated an indebtedness of some sixteen thousand roubles, but he reminds her that besides the five thousand advance he had taken from Suvorin and the seven thousand mortgage from the bank, he had already earned two thousand on stories and expected to earn two to three thousand more by April, not counting any income he received from his plays. He had even rejected a proffered loan again from Levitan's Maecenas, S. T. Morozov, because his friend had insisted that Chekhov deal directly with the millionaire. In any event, he declared, he expected to be free of all but bank debts by the beginning of 1900. And if he got stuck, he concluded, he could mortgage the new estate he'd bought, but, he added: "All are in raptures with my Kuchukoi." (December 17,1898.)
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Chekhov had not exaggerated his earnings on short stories over 1898, especially if he included in his estimate the income from the last two that he had written since he reached Yalta — A Doctor's Visit[13]and The Darling? The first, no doubt based on Chekhov's experience in doctoring a member of a wealthy factory-owning family near Melikhovo, is penetrated by a fresh sense of the social inequities that poison human relations. The moment of illumination comes when the doctor, with his cool, scientific mind, which is not devoid of a certain emotional sensitivity, perceives that the young heiress he is treating, for a nervous disorder is really suffering from a case of conscience. The cause is her wealth wrung from the labor of factory workers living on the verge of starvation.
In Chekhov's stories love rarely succeeds in an ideal sense, but The Darling, one of his best-known tales, seems to be something of an exception in this respect. For here he is concerned with illustrating the contention that the object of a woman's love is of comparatively little importance, for it is the law of her being to love something or somebody. He tells us with delicate insistance throughout the story that Olenka was always fond of someone and could not exist without loving. One may be amused at the swift transfer of her affections as fate removes the objects of her love —first the theater manager, then the timber merchant, and next the veterinary — yet one never doubts the sincerity, self-abnegation, and devotion of her warm nature; at the end all these qualities are bestowed on a little boy — a supreme act of love for the one individual who can offer least in return.
Gorbunov-Posadov wrote Chekhov that Tolstoy was in raptures over The Darling. "He tells everyone that this is a pearl, that Chekhov is a great, great writer," and that he had read it four times to friends and the family with added attraction each time. Later Tolstoy included the story in his Readings for Every Day in the Year and wrote a critical foreward, in which he expressed the curious opinion that Chekhov's heroine was intended to be a satire on the "new woman," a seeker after equality with men. Though his purpose was to ridicule her, Tolstoy conjectures, in the end the poetry in his soul forbade this. What makes the story so excellent, Tolstoy concludes, is that the effect is unintentional.
If Chekhov had been able to read this comment — it was published only after his death — he would probably have been more amused than annoyed. At about the time he was working on The Darling, he received a letter from Gorbunov-Posadov, who informed him that Tolstoy had assigned all the profits from Resurrection to aid the emigration of the persecuted sect of Dukhobors to Canada: "In all my life," Chekhov responded, "I've never esteemed a man so profoundly, one might even say, so unquestioningly, as Leo Nikolaevich." (November 9, 1898.) The wonderful poetic effect which Tolstoy so much admired in The Darling is not unintentional but an achievement of Chekhov's conscious artistry. He is not mocking his pitiful heroine's need to love. With all his acute insight, Tolstoy never quite perceived the breadth and tolerance of Chekhov's judgment, his tenderness for