Chekhov's honest attempt to clarify the unhappy situation that had overtaken Suvorin clicitcd only a brief commcnt in his diary: "I wrote Chekhov. Sent him my explanation of the Court of Honor. He found it of 'little significance.' "
Suvorin's wife, however, perhaps reflecting her husband's feelings, wrote Chekhov a letter of sharp reproof. "You reproach me for disloyalty," he replied, "in that Alexei Sergeevich is good, and disinterested, and that I do not respond to this. But as a seriously well- disposed person, what can I do for him now? What? The present situation has not come about all at once, it has been going on for many years, and what people say now they have been saying everywhere for a long time — and you and Alexei Sergeevich did not know the truth, as kings do not know it. I'm not philosophizing but stating what I know. New Times is experiencing difficult days, but certainly it is still a power and will remain one; after a little time has elapsed, everything will get back into its groove and nothing will change and all will be as before." (March 29,1899.)
To a considerable extent Chekhov was right. He well understood the short memory of the public and its inertia in national affairs. But the dwindling relations between the two men were further eroded by this controversy. In this difficult period of personal misfortune for Suvorin, Chekhov tried to be friendly and repeatedly invited him, without any success, to visit or meet him in Europe. Chekhov was not a man to desert anyone in adversity. But the fissure in their friendship which had begun over the Dreyfus affair was widened by the sale of Chekhov's works to Marx and by Chekhov's unsympathetic attitude toward Suvorin's behavior in the student disorders. Though they did not entirely lose contact with each other, at the end of 1899 Chekhov wrote his brother Misha, who requested him to appeal to Suvorin for a favor on his behalf, "With Suvorin I have
long since broken off correspondence ..."
« 5 »
Masha's small Moscow apartment, where her mother also lived when not at Melikhovo, was suddenly transformed into a crowded salon when Chekhov arrived in April. What a joy to be back in the metropolis after Yalta, a cross that not everyone can bear, he had complained to Orlov, for it abounded in drabness, slander, intrigue, and the most shameful calumny.
From eight in the morning to ten at night the samovar was kept boiling as friends visited the improvised study, its table piled high with copies of the stories Chekhov was editing for the Marx edition. Often an unbidden guest — an unknown admirer, a writer from Siberia, a Melikhovo neighbor, or a school comrade whom- he had entirely forgotten — would sit there in worshipful silence, making Chekhov and favored visitors feel uncomfortable. Yet he could not get himself to turn such a caller away or even hint that he was remaining too long. At times, according to Stanislavsky, he would lose patiencc with one of these long-sitting silent interlopers, call Masha to the door, and whisper: "Now listen, tell him that I don't know him and that I never studied with him at school. I know he has a manuscript in his pocket. He'll remain for dinner and read it. This is really impossible." Or the bell would ring and Masha would go to the door. The guests would retreat to the corners; Chekhov sat on the divan, trying not to cough, and a pained silence fell over the room. An unknown voice would be heard from the entrance: "Oh, so he's busy? . . . Tin's will take only two minutes." . . . ("Good, I'll give it to him," came the firm tones of Masha.) "Only a little tale . . ." ("Good-by," Masha would say.) "The support of young talent . . . certainly an enlightened patron . . ." ("Good-by," firmly insisted Masha.) . . . "Humble, profound, full of . . . aesthetic moments . . . profound . . . full to the depths . . ." (The door finally would close, and Masha would enter the study and place on the table a bundle of rumpled manuscript tied with a string.) "You should have told him that I don't write any more, that there is no point in writing!" Chekhov would exclaim with a sigh, looking over the manuscript. Nevertheless, he would not only read all these manuscripts, remarked Stanislavsky, who witnessed this scene, but would answer the letters sent to him about them.
Masha's apartment soon proved inadequate to accommodate all these callers and provide Chekhov with a room to which he could retreat for work. He rented another on the same street, Malaya Dmitrovka, near the Strastnoi Monastery whose bells he loved to hear. Tolstoy was one of his first visitors, but two actors among those present insisted on talking so much about the theater —as though it were the greatest thing in the world, Chekhov remarked dryly —that he was prevented from holding any conversation with his famous guest. The next day he had dinner at the Tolstoys' Moscow house. The two writers talked much about Gorky, and Tolstoy praised him, compliments which Chekhov hastened to pass on to his new friend.
But the excitement of being in Moscow during the Easter season proved too much for Chekhov. He reported to his physician at Yalta, Altschuler: ". . . Crowds of visitors, endless conversations — on the second day of the festivities I could hardly move from weariness, and I felt as lifeless as a corpse. Yesterday I had supper at Fedotova's0 which lasted till two in the morning. I do this to spite you." He was glad to retire to Melikhovo on May 7 for a rest. This month of pleasure at Moscow had cost him about three thousand roubles, at which rate, he reckoned, all the money from Marx would soon be an agreeable memory.
But there was not much rest at Melikhovo, for Chekhov was obsessed with the desire to finish the construction of the new village school in a hurry. He had angrily resigned trusteeships in two of the district schools because of the tiresome bickering between the teachers and the local authorities and their tendency to descend upon him for aid whenever any little thing went wrong. For months Chekhov had been perhaps unconsciously preparing himself to part with Melikhovo, this beloved estate, in which he had put so much of himself and which was associated with The Sea Gull and a number of his best stories. The sudden notion of buying a house in Moscow was vaguely connected in his mind with the idea that he would some day soon have to get rid of his estate. Although his mother and sister strongly approved of purchasing a Moscow house, on which he was extravagantly prepared to spend as much as thirty thousand roubles, ultimately nothing came of this, although Masha searched long and hard for a dwelling that would please him. Behind this plan was a far-fetched belief he entertained that within a couple of years his health would be sufficiently improved for him to spend his winters in Moscow.
The assertion of his mother and sister, now, that they found it difficult to continue to live at Melikhovo after the father's death, was something of a rationalization of the real reason for selling the estate, which he finally decided to do in June. Masha herself was getting tired of Melikhovo. She deplored the mounting costs of maintaining its expanded developments. Further, she had become increasingly annoyed over the unpleasant behavior of the peasants and their thieving
e Glikeriya Nikolaevna Fedotova, a well-known actrcss.
propensities. And if her brother could not live there most of the time, the estate lost all its attraction for her.
Chekhov perhaps gave the real reason for selling when he explained that Melikhovo had become a luxury once his health prevented him from living there regularly, and besides, he confessed, since the writing of Peasants, Melikhovo had lost its literary importance for him. With
this new real estate mania that had come over him, he hardlv knew
' j
where he would stay and at what time of the year — at Melikhovo, or Moseow, or at his new Yalta house, or at Kuchukoi. "Now I have four places to live," he whimsically wrote Varvara Kharkeevich, "and I ought to have a wife in each, so that after my death all of them eould assemble on the shore at Yalta and tear each other's hair out. . . ." (May 20,1899.)