His brother Misha more seriously prodded him, and not for the first time, and now Chekhov decided to give him a serious answer: "Concerning my marrying, on which you insist — how can I explain it to you? To marry is interesting only when one is in love; to marry a girl simply because she is attractive is like buying something unnecessary at a bazaar merely because it is nice. The most important thing in family life is love, sexual attraction, being of one flesh — all the rest is unreliable and dreary, no matter how cleverly we may have calculated. So it is not the question of an attractive girl but of her being loved; as you can see, my delaying the matter counts for little." (October 26, 1898.)
However attractive she may have been to him at one time, Lika had never really inspired this kind of love in Chekhov. Yet there was hardly any woman in his life whose company he appeared to enjoy more than hers, and perhaps just because the war of the sexes between them never ceased, and he had the satisfaction of knowing that the victory would always be his. Now, though he had apparently written Lika a number of times, he had heard nothing from her for months. She was again in Paris studying singing, and mutual friends there had reported to him fine things about the quality of her voice combined with criticism of her lack of musical taste. Then suddenly a letter to Yalta rejoiced him. She, too, twitted him about rumors of his forthcoming marriage, and he replied in that familiar, jocose tone he had invented especially for her: "That I'm going to marry is another fable you have thrust into the world. You know that I'll never marry without your permission. You are sure of this, yet you circulate these various rumors — probably by the logic of the old hunter, who does not use his gun, or lets others, use it, and merely grumbles and groans while lying on the oven. No, my dear Lika, no! I'll not marry without your permission. . . ." Then after a few amusing details about mutual friends, his doings at Yalta, and the hope that he will see her if he goes to Moscow in January, he concludes: "I repeat once again that your letter made me very, very •glad, but I'm afraid you won't believe it and will fail to answer soon. I •swear, Lika, that I miss you." (September 21,1898.)
In reply, Lika sent him her latest photograph and urged him to visit her in Paris. He answered promptly, but after a serious opening about the death of his father and the changes this might bring about at Melikhovo, he thanked Lika for her portrait: "You are even beautiful, which I somehow didn't expect." He expressed the strongest desire to зее her, but he had no money to go to Paris, he said, and he ended: "Where did you get the idea that I had a bald spot? What impertinence! I know: You are revenging yourself on me because once in one of my letters I pointed out to you, in friendly fashion and not at all wishing to offend you, that you are lopsided; and that this is the reason why, unfortunately, you have not yet found a husband." (October 24, 1898.)
On the other hand, since Lidiya Avilova's visit to Chekhov in Dr. Ostroumov's clinic, her persistent assault upon his affections had been going from bad to worse. She grew progressively irritated by the fact that he never wrote her except to answer her letters, and because the imaginary relationship she had concocted seemed to be moving further and further away from any contact with reality. With his dread of hurting anyone's feelings, he was helpless in the face of her tendency now to nag and indulge in quite unprovoked recriminations. Occasionally, however, a note of annoyance would creep into his answers. This seems to have been the case in his reply to a letter she had written him in July 1898 — one which she, again understandably, did not quote in her memoirs. She had pleaded "for only three words" — it was some nine months sincc he had last written her — and, apparently in the hope of -seeing him, she asked if he would be in the Skopin district where she was vacationing. "I've not been in the Skopin district and am hardly likely to go there," he rather brusquely answered. "I'm staying at home, doing some writing — that is, busy." To her resentment over the criticism of her stories which he had expressed in his letter of the previous November, he remarked that he was sorry. "If my letters are sometimes harsh or cold, this comes from my lack of seriousness and skill in writing them; I ask your indulgence and I assure you that the phrase with which you conclude your letter —'if you are happy, then you will be kinder to me' —I definitely do not deserve." (July 10, 1898.)
Avilova must have answered this rather pleasantly, for less than two weeks later he replied in an amiable, chatty letter which she quoted in her memoirs. He tells her how busy he is at Melikhovo, how much he receives for his stories, but that he is getting fed up with writing: "Now when I write, or think that I have to write something, I have the same kind of repugnance I would feel in eating cabbage soup from which a cockroach had just been removed — forgive the comparison." Then, as a kind of afterthought, he ends: "I must send something for the August issue of Russian Thought; I've already written it, but I must polish it."
Avilova avidly seized upon this afterthought — she was certain that Chekhov was covertly drawing her attention to the August number of Russian Thought. As she explains in her memoirs, she had got used to reading between the lines of his letters. She obtained a copy of the magazine as soon as it appeared, and of course she found two tales there — Gooseberries and About Love. "The one title About Love threw me into violent agitation," she wrote in her memoirs (Chapter XV). "Making all sorts of surmises, I ran back home with the magazine in my hand."
With her incredible propensity for wishful thinking, Lidiya Avilova jumped to the conclusion that the love of Alekhin and Anna Alekseevna in the story was solidly based on her relations with Chekhov. As she read it and came to the passage where Alekhin gives the reasons why he did not declare his love, Avilova writes in her memoirs: "I was no longer crying but sobbed hysterically. ... So he did not blame me. Lie did not blame, but justified, understood, and grieved with me." When she came to Alekhin's conclusion, that in love man must be guided by something higher than happiness or unhappiness, Avilova decided that she could not understand what that something "higher" was: "I knew and understood only one thing, that life had crushed me and that it was impossible to free myself from its vise. If my family prevented me from being happy with Anton Pavlovich, then Anton Pavlovich prevented me from being happy with my family."
There is an element of the preposterous in the correspondences that Lydiya Avilova professed to see in the tale. Many more differences than resemblances can be pointed out between the love story of Anna Alekseevna and Alekhin and Avilova's fancied relations with Chekhov. Actually, there is very little in common between the characterizations of the wife, husband, and lover in the tale and Lidiya Avilova, her husband, and Chekhov. Although it is conceivable that their strange relationship may have contributed something to this tale, it is even more -conceivable, in the light of Chekhov's special interests and emphasis in his fiction, that he would have written such a story even if he had never known Lidiya Avilova. Even the outline of the central theme of About Love in Chekhov's notebook in no sense supports Avilova's contention.
Nevertheless, Avilova wrote Chekhov an angry letter, sarcastically thanking him for the honor of appearing as the heroine of one of his stories, and telling him of a writer she heard about who does all sorts of mean and disgusting things in order to describe them realistically in his fiction. How many themes, she asked, must an author discover in order to publish hundreds of short stories? "That is, the writer, like the Ъее, gathers his honey where he can find it. . . . He is bored and sick of writing . . . but he goes on coldly and indifferently describing feelings that his soul can no longer experience, because his talent has crowded out his soul. And the colder the writer, the more sensitive and touching are his stories. Let the readers weep over them. That is art."