But this was early spring. The winter at Yalta had been an unusually harsh one and construction work on the house had been slowed almost to a standstill. The bad weather frequently compelled him to sit at home in his rented rooms and mope, as he said, although he had a mountain of work to do for the Marx edition. At such times his spirits yearned for Moscow. Chekhov could not get over his curious ambivalence about Yalta. To the ill he loyally defended it, insisting this resort town was to be preferred over Nice and that he knew many consumptives whose health had much improved at Yalta. For himself, however, he declared that he would much rather be destroyed by the rigorous climate of the North than by the provincial boredom of this town where the doctors had condemned him to live.
For a "bored" person, however, he kept surprisingly active over the winter months at Yalta. As a member of the town committee to plan the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Pushkin's birth, he played a prominent part in organizing the staging of scenes from the poet's Boris Godunov. And he arranged two amateur performances on behalf of his current charity, the famine-ridden peasant children of Samara, for whom he collected a thousand roubles. For a time he attempted to hold "Thursdays" in his rooms for callers. But he complained that they sat too long, and when the literary-minded headmistress of the girls' school began to introduce her awed teachers of literature, who embarrassed him by their dogged silence, he abandoned his Thursdays.
Despite the off-season period, friends visited Yalta — Lavrov of Russian Thought and Dr. N. I. Korobov, his old Medical School comrade who had lived with the family in those dark, poverty-stricken Moscow days. Chekhov busied himself arranging for suitable accommodations for Korobov's wife, who had tuberculosis.
One day toward the end of winter, Nadezhda Golubeva, the sister of Mariya Kiseleva at Babkino, visited Yalta and decided to call on Chekhov. It took some courage, for it was six years since she had last seen him in her Petersburg home, when he had behaved rather strangely at dinner and discouraged her literary ambitions. Besides, she had already heard that many Yalta ladies pursued him, threw flowers in his window, and wrote him confessions of love.
After she had waited a considerable time, he appeared. She hardly recognized him; his face had changed and taken on the appearance of parchment. He explained that he had kept her waiting because he had hesitated to see her for fear that she would summon up the past. But he soon laughed and recalled the happy days at Babkino. He spoke enthusiastically of his new house and his hideaway at Kuchukoi. She knew this tiny and nearly inaccessible village and remarked that one must be queer to want to live in such a remote spot. He coughed, she recalls in her recollections of the meeting, and replied: "You involuntarily become a queer fellow when all is lost and life sputters like a candle going out."
Chekhov also renewed his acquaintance with Bunin, who visited Yalta in the early spring. As the two sat talking on a bench by the shore, Bunin asked if Chekhov liked the sea. Yes, he answered, and added after a pause: "It is very difficult to describe the sea. Do you know the description of it that I read in the copybook of a schoolboy not long ago? 'The sea was huge.' Only that. I think it is beautiful." Though this might appear to be a mannerism, Bunin ruminated, it reminded him that Chekhov always preferred naturalness in description. Hence, Bunin concluded, with his dislike for anything pretentious or strained, "The sea was huge" seemed to him precisely "beautiful."
The early spring also brought Gorky, who arrived in Yalta with Mirolyubov. For some time Chekhov had been urging Gorky to visit, for the two had never met. Though Gorky had incipient tuberculosis and had come to Yalta for treatment, to see Chekhov was perhaps the real reason for his decision to make the trip from Nizhny Novgorod.
Up to this point these two writers, whose personalities and artistic practices were so different in many ways, had got to know cach other only through correspondence. Though full of admiration for some of his stories, Chekhov had not spared the younger author's faults of characterization and style. Early in January Chekhov had written him again of his lack of restraint and of what he called "gracc." There was a feeling of excess in his lavish use of words, Chekhov insisted. "When a person expends the least possible movement on a certain act, that is grace." Recalling his commcnt to Bunin, he disapproved of Gorky's anthropomorphism in nature descriptions, "When you have the sea breathe, the heavens gaze down, the steppe caress, nature whisper, speak, or grow mournful, etc. — such usage makes your descriptions monotonous, occasionally saccharine, and sometimes unclear; pictur- csqueness and expressiveness in descriptions of nature are attained only through simplicity, by the use of such plain phrases as "The sun camc out,' 'It became dark,' 'It rained,' etc." And he warned Gorky of his fondness for portraying the unattractive aspects of local officialdom. He knew these people well, he assured Gorky, and they were altogether untypical and usually of no interest.
The repetitive and flamboyant effects in Gorky's stories sometimes annoyed him, and in a letter to Avilova he sharply commented: "I like Gorky, but lately he has begun to write nonsense, disgusting nonsense, so much so that I'll soon have to give up reading him." (March 9, 1899.) Nor did he hesitate to pass on to Gorky, becausc he thought it justifiable, Tolstoy's observation: " 'You can invent anything you please, but it is impossible to invent psychology, and psychological inventions abound in Gorky; he describes what he has not felt.' " (April 25, 1899.)
Chekhov criticized perhaps because he found so much promise and many right instincts in Gorky the writer. It was primarily a lack of artistic self-discipline that troubled him. He did not like Gorky's first novel, Foma Gordeev, and later that year he agreed to his request to dedicate it to him with diffidence and only if he restricted the dedication to a simple ascription. In his letter of acceptance he quite characteristically advised that in the proof of the novel Gorky delete as many superfluous words as possible. The reader's mind, he observed, finds it hard to concentrate on them and he soon grows tired. "You understand it at once when I write: 'The man sat on the grass.' You understand it because it is clear and makes no demand on the attention. On the other hand, it is not easily understood and it is difficult for the mind if I write: 'A tall, narrow-chested, middle-sized man, with a red beard, sat on the green grass trampled by passersby, sat silently, looking around him timidly and fearfully.' This is not immediately grasped by the mind, whereas good writing should be grasped at once, in a second." (September 3,1899.)