Masha had to assume most of the burden of trying to find a Moscow house and of arranging for the sale of Melikhovo. Chekhov hoped to receive twenty-five thousand roubles for the estate and its furnishings, ten thousand of which he intended to give to Masha in return for her years of effort in taking care of the affairs of Melikhovo. But weeks passed and no house was found in Moscow, nor did a buyer of the estate turn up among the several interested parties, although advertisements were inserted in newspapers and an agent was employed. The delays increased Chekhov's restlessness. He was willing to lower his price for the estate, and, convinced that he would never live in Melikhovo after this summer, he busied himself in supervising the packing of personal belongings, books, and porch furniture to be sent to Yalta. Rather sadly he wrote Iordanov to excuse himself for not having fulfilled the latest requests to aid the Taganrog library and museum: he had lost the right to a settled life, he explained. "I don't know what to do with myself. I'm building a dacha at Yalta' but I've come to Moscow, whieh I've suddenly grown to like despite the stink; there I rented an apartment for a whole year, and now I'm in the eountry; the apartment is loeked, they are building the dacha without me — what an absurdity it all is." (May 15,1899.)
On June 10 Chekhov made a hurried one-day trip to Petersburg to talk over with Marx various details of the edition of his works and returned to Moseow in the hope of interviewing prospective buyers of Melikhovo. The city was hot and stuffy. He visited his father's grave for the first time, and later ordered a simple stone with only the name and dates inscribed on it. To Gorky, to whom he had sent presents of a watch and his photograph, he wrote that he paraded along Tverskoi Boulevard, talked with prostitutes, and dined in the International Restaurant. Then suddenly, in a letter to Masha at Melikhovo, he announced that he was leaving for Taganrog on July 12 to inspect some factories there.
chapter xxi
"Hello, Last Page of My Life, Great Actress of the Russian Land"
However genuine his reason for going to Taganrog, Chekhov's unexpected departure for the South was really to keep a rendezvous with Olga Knipper. When a telegraph operator in Moscow had noticed his signature 011 the blank and excitedly declared that he had treated her mother's illness fifteen years previously, he remarked about the incident to a friend: "But how old I've become! However, though I've been a doctor fifteen years, I still want to traipse after the young ladies." Indeed, shortly before he had left Yalta for Moscow, he had written to Lika in Paris, to urge her to visit him; he would take her for a trip along the Crimean shore, and then they could go on to Moscow together.
Lika had turned him down, yet curiously enough Chekhov now proposed to take this same trip with Olga Knipper. In fact, his eagerness to get to Moscow that April may well have been subconsciously connected with a desire to see again the charming actress who had so deeply impressed him the previous September in the role of Irina in Tsar Fyodor. Throughout that fall and winter Masha had been feeding his imagination about Olga with ecstatic comments in her letters. "Knipper, as formerly, is ravishing," Masha reported after seeing The Sea Gull for the second time. At the third performance, Vishnevsky took Masha backstage and introduced her to the cast: "Knipper began to cut capers, I gave her your regards," his sister wrote. "I advise you to pay some attention to Knipper. In my opinion she is very interesting." Soon Masha and Olga were exchanging social visits.
After his arrival in Moscow, Chekhov had lost little time in getting in touch with Olga and in being introduced to the "mad Knipper family," as Gorky later described them. The widowed mother, children, and two uncles lived together in a small Moscow flat. They were a noisy, talented lot — the mother's singing pupils bellowed in one room while Olga practiced her roles in another, and the uncles — especially Sasha, who liked the bottle — quarreled with each other or read Tolstoy or Chekhov aloud. On his first visit, however, Chekhov had eyes only for Olga and ignored the other guests. A few days later they visited an exhibition of Levitan's paintings.
Olga was his first visitor at Melikhovo that May, "three wonderful spring days," she recalls. She adored his mother, "a quiet Russian woman with a sense of humor." Chekhov, in the liveliest of spirits, showed her around his little estate — the pond, the orchard all in blossom, the vegetable and flower garden — and she observed how his face grew sad at the sight of cut or uprooted flowers. He presented her with a photograph of the Lodge, where he had written The Sea Gull. Everything about the atmosphere of Melikhovo, its pleasant, simple, happy, family life, attracted her. "The cordiality, affection, coziness, the conversation full of jokes and wit, captivated me. . . . These were three days filled with a beautiful presentiment, with joy, with the sun."
Long after this visit she wrote him: "How delighted I was with everything! I was a little afraid of you then. But that heavenly morning when we took a walk together!"
Olga's gay, ardent nature and love of life recommended her to the family, especially to Anton. He respected her dedication to her art and the hard work she devoted to it, but he liked also the fact that she enjoyed talking about the infinite commonplaces of life, far removed from the theater and literature. She knew how to make him laugh and how to fascinate him with her changeable moods, as though she were trying them all out in order to discover the one that would most please his fastidious taste. When she left Melikhovo they were both obviously filled with a consuming curiosity to learn more about each other.
Olga went to the Caucasus to spend her vacation at her brother's dacha near Mtskhet, but before she left it is clear that she and Chekhov had some understanding that they would meet in the South. On June 16 he wrote her his first letter, a brief note cast somewhat in the light, bantering tone of his correspondence with Lika — why had they not heard from her, had she married in the Caucasus? The author had been forgotten — and how terrible, how cruel and perfidious! At about the same time he added a postscript to one of Masha's letters to Olga: "Hello, last page of my life, great actress of the Russian land. I envy the Circassians who see you every day. ... I wish you a wonderful disposition, captivating dreams."1
Olga wrote that they might meet after she left Mtskhet and he could accompany her to Yalta — a plan he had pretty certainly suggested himself. "Yes, you arc right," he replied, "the author Chekhov has not forgotten the actress Knipper. Besides, your proposal to go together from Batum to Yalta seems to him charming." He set up the conditions of their meeting, and the third one was "that you don't turn my head. Vishnevsky regards me as a very serious person, and I would not want to reveal myself as weak as all the others." (July i, 1899.) But he had to communicate to her a changc of plans — he had to go to Taganrog and would meet her at Novorossiisk on July 18. After a few days at Taganrog, where he saw Iordanov and other friends, and actually did inspect factories — though the purpose is not clear unless it was to collcct material for a story —he left for Novorossiisk on July 17. There he and Olga met and went by steamer on the two-day trip to Yalta.
Chekhov stayed at the Hotel Marino on the shore and Olga with the family of Dr. L. V. Srcdin, friends of her own family and also of Chekhov, who had got to know them well at Yalta. Chekhov seems to have divided his time during the next ten days between taking Olga to sec the sights in Yalta and its environs and making frequent trips to Autka to superintend the construction of his house, which was by now well underway. No doubt he took her out to Oreanda for the view, and perhaps they sat there on that same bench, not far from the church, where the two lovers sat in his tale, The Lady with the Dog, and looked down at the sea. From there Yalta was barely visible in the morning mist. White clouds rested on the mountaintops. And from below came the monotonous muffled sound of the sea. Perhaps he thought, as the lover in the story did in that peaceful spot, how really beautiful everything is in the world, everything except what we ourselves think or do when wc forget the higher aims of life and our own human dignity.