Olga despaired of the irregularity of his life, of the way he would skip meals and avoid invitations to dinner to the homes of friends.
1 Literaturnoe Nasledstvo (Literary Heritage), Moscow, i960, LXVIII, 225.
"Knipper is in Yalta," he wrote Masha, who no doubt was quite surprised to receive this bit of news. "She is depressed. Yesterday she visited me, drank tea; she just sat and was silent." (July 21, 1899.) In a second letter, in answer to one from Masha, in which she expressed her uncertainties on reaching decisions without him with prospective purchasers of Melikhovo, he turned on her with unusual sharpness, as though annoyed that she should bother him with a commercial matter at a time like this. He had given her power of attorney, he declared, and would have nothing to do with selling the estate. "The price is entirely up to you. Sell it even for fifteen thousand, I won't quarrel with it. Knipper is here, she is very sweet, but is in the dumps. . . . Knipper likes your room very much. It isn't a room but a bit of magic." (July 22, 1899.)
On August 2 the couple set out for Moscow, taking a roundabout way — a carriage to Bakhchisarai over the Ai-Petri range. The setting was romantic, the weather lovely, the southern air soft and caressing. The hilly countryside had a wild beauty. They passed white villas among fields of roses edged with cypress trees, deserted Moslem cemeteries, and little Tatar villages clinging to the shore. As they drove by a rural hospital, people on the porch frantically beckoned to them; but they did not stop, thinking that the waves were probably insane patients — actually it turned out that they were some of Chekhov's Yalta medical friends, who had recognized him, and the incident became the subject of much chaff. The picturesque Kokkoz valley had its own special enchantment, and Olga recalled the pleasure of driving along in the springy carriage, breathing air laden with the fragrance of pines, and chatting in the charming, amusing Chekhov style. And, when the sun reached its height, languid from the heat, they dozed. At Bakhchisarai they boarded a train for Moscow. This lovely excursion had brought them closer together, and the memory of it sustained them in the following months of separation.
Immediately upon their arrival, Olga had to plunge into rehearsals for the second season of the Moscow Art Theater and he saw very little of her. His mind was much relieved when he learned from Masha that a timber merchant, M. Konshin, had bought Melikhovo and wished to take possession of it as soon as possible. The man had a pleasant personality, Masha reported, but he appeared to have little money. The Chekhovs had to agree to an installment form of payment for the twenty-three-thousand-rouble purchase price, and it was some time before the first installment was paid. Eventually the whole agreement broke down, a fact that may have had something to do with Chekhov's dropping the idea of buying a Moscow house.2 The village school had been completed in late June, the estate was now sold, and Chekhov, without any apparent regret, rolled down the curtain on the Melikhovo period of his life — perhaps his happiest.
He lingered on in Moscow for a few weeks, purchased books for the Taganrog library, completed the editing for the first volume of his collected works, and visited friends. Somewhat to his mortification, he found it necessary to ask Marx for an advance of five thousand roubles on the next payment, basing his request on the fact that he had completed copy for the first volume on time. He had already run through the initial payment of fifteen thousand roubles. The publisher advanced him only two thousand. As a favor for Sinani in Yalta, he saw the rector of Moscow University in an endeavor to persuade him to admit a Jewish student as a transfer from another institution; but he was very brusquely treated, the request was denied, and the experience almost made him feel unwell.
In fact, shortly thereafter he did fall ill. "I don't know whether the bacilli are in revolt," he wrote Suvorin on August 19, "or if the weather is making itself felt, but I seem to have reached the end of my endurance and my head inclines to the pillow." Yalta, he believed, was the answer, and he left for that town a week later.
« 2 »
Masha and her mother came to the new house at Autka on September 8 and the real Yalta period of Chekhov's family life began. It was not a very auspicious beginning. Workmen hammered, sawed, and drilled all day, and weeks passed before the house was finally finished. To complicate matters his old Serpukhov friend Dr. Kurkin came the day after his mother and sister, and remained for a month. The pounding prevented Chekhov from doing any consistent work, yet the pressure to write was great, for Marx's advance of two thousand had already vanished — bills for labor on the new house were endless and now he had to support two old servants who had been brought from Melikhovo and two men hired to do odd jobs. He contemplated a bank loan, but
2 In fact, after living on the estate three years, Konshin defaulted on his payments and Melikhovo was resold to a certain Baron Styuart.
fortunately the delayed first payment of the purchaser of Melikhovo saved the situation for the time being. Eventually the noisy workmen finished, Chekhov could settle down to writing in his new study —a possibility he had been eagerly anticipating for months — and most important, his mother liked living in Yalta. Before Masha returned to her teaching position in Moscow, he took her and his mother to see his Kuchukoi hideaway and they grudgingly admitted to its charm — despite the dizzy climb, which terrified his mother.
He liked to receive letters, Chekhov said, but not to answer them. By now his volume of mail, which he handled entirely himself, had grown very large.3 His study had become a post office, he grumbled, as he tried to keep down essential answers to five a day. One answer on October 11 throws some light on the influence of science on his literary practices. When in Moscow the past spring, he had begged off an invitation to attend a dinner of his Medical School class on its fifteenth reunion. The gathering sent him a flattering greeting; and now he was requested by his old classmate and friend, Dr. Rossolimo, to send his photograph for a class album, an autobiographical sketch, and dues for a class mutual aid society — decisions that had been taken at the reunion. Chekhov forwarded the picture and dues, but pleaded that he was afflicted by a disease called "autobiographophobia." It had always been a real torment, he explained, to prepare such sketches for publication, but he agreed to provide the bare facts, which he managed to telescope into half a page. However, he did add the following interesting comment:
"My work in medical sciences has undoubtedly had a serious influence on my literary development; it significantly extended the area of my observations, enriched my knowledge, and only one who is himself a physician could understand the true value of all this for me as a writer; this training has also been a guide, and probably because of my closeness to medicine, I have managed to avoid many mistakes. Familiarity with the natural sciences and scientific method has always kept me on my guard, and I have tried, whenever possible, to take scientific data into consideration, and where that was impossible, I've preferred not to write at all. I may note, however, that artistic considerations do not always permit one to be in complete agreement with scientific data; you cannot show death by poisoning on the stage