In fact, the speed with which his first installment of money had disappeared drove Chekhov back to his writing desk as soon as some degree of quiet reigned that fall in the newly constructed Yalta house. The Lady with the Dog11 he soon finished, and later a brief sketch of the simple annals of the poor, At Christmas Time,12 for the holiday issue of that repository of so many of his youthful stories, the Petersburg Gazette. He also planned The Bishop and completed a long story, The Ravine, but too late to be published that year.
The Lady with the Dog is the first literary fruit of Chekhov's Yalta life and the beginning of the tale is penetrated with the atmosphere of this resort — its sights and sounds, its dusty roads, eating places off the esplanade, the stately cypresses, the soft, warm lilac color of the sea under the bright sunlight and the golden band of moonlight across it at night. T'urgenev might have written a whole novel on this theme, in which case it would have lost the powerful, concentrated impact Chekhov's amazing compression imparts. There is a Maupassant flavor in this story of adultery, which begins 011 a note of casual philandering and mounts through a series of intensifying emotional experiences to a crescendo of profound but hopeless love. Though the conclusion may be anti-romantic, Chekhov's sympathy — as so often in his fiction — with these helpless, illicit lovers, whose star-crossed fate is not of their own making, is plainly apparent at the end. Gorky, with his characteristic ebullience, declared after reading the story that he wanted to change wives, and to suffer and swear in the same spirit. Everything else seemed written not with a pen but with a fencepost. "No one can write so simply about simple things as you can," he told Chekhov. "Your tales are exquisite phials filled with all the smells of life. . . ."
«5»
During November and December Chekhov was so busy with his writing, with editing copy for Marx, and with "bombarding the philanthropists of the capital and the provinces" for money for the projected sanatorium, that Olga complained he had deserted her. Certainly
11 Russian Thought, December 1899.
la Petersburg Gazette, January 1900.
Masha did not let him forget Olga, who had sent him gifts of candy and scent. He had replied by shipping her a jewel box. For by now Masha and Olga had become quite intimate friends, often dined together, and on occasion Olga stayed the night with her. Everything Olga said about Chekhov, his sister reported to him. At an evening with the Knipper family she teasingly wrote of getting acquainted with his "mother-in-law," and archly mentioned the fondness of other men, like Nemivorich-Danchenko and Vishnevsky, for Olga. "But what a fine person she is," wrote Masha. "Of this I become more convinced every day. A great worker and, in my opinion, very talented." And, she pointedly continued, "Lika is bored. At least, I saw her looking bored in a group. She rarely visits me." In one of Masha's letters, Vishnevsky appended a postscript to tell Chekhov that Olga was sitting by with emptiness in her head and heart, and when he had said that he'd give twenty-five roubles to see Chekhov at that moment, she had added that she would give only three kopecks.
"I thank you," Chekhov retorted in a letter to Olga on November 19. "You are very lavish. But let a little time pass, say a month or two, and you will not give even two kopecks. How people change! Meanwhile, I'd give seventy-five roubles to see you." (November lg, 1899.) Not until December 8 did he send her another brief note: "Sweet actress, charming woman, I don't write because I'm deep in work and don't allow myself to be distracted," and he promised she would hear from him soon again.
Masha visited Yalta for the Christmas holiday season, and she must have been unpleasantly surprised to observe that her brother, now thoroughly settled in his new house, had reverted, in some measure, to the practice of medicine. For she notes in her recollections, "The poor people of Autka came to him at any hour of the day or night for medical aid." And the local journalist Beschinsky recalled: "I personally knew of the ways Chekhov sometimes helped the sick 'to arrange things for themselves cheaply.' Through me he paid for their quarters, or he assumed their total expenses in the shelters for chronic cases of the charitable society, and at his request I used to visit these sick people there." At this time Chekhov was also very anxious over the report, which turned out to be true, of the serious illness of Tolstoy — he told the minor writer B. L. Lazarevsky, whose manuscripts he was correcting, that Tolstoy's "moral influence is so great, that there are people who are ashamed to do evil things simply because Tolstoy lives."
Chekhov was particularly delighted by a visit from Levitan in December. This old friend was in the best of moods. After listening to Chekhov's complaints that he was bored with the scenery of Crimea and longed to see again the fields of his northern Russia, Levitan, in the course of half an hour, painted such a scene — a night in a hayfield — cocks of hay, a forest in the distance, and a moon reigning on high above it all. Grateful, Chekhov set the canvas in a niche over his fireplace. With his customary modesty he appears not to have informed Levitan that he had received, shortly before his arrival, the government's award of the Order of Saint Stanislav for his zeal on behalf of national education, a rather belated tribute to his extensive efforts in this field.
However, it was not only a nostalgia for northern sccnes of nature that turned Chekhov's thoughts in that direction. To be sure, as he remarked more than once, the weather in Yalta that winter was again so bad that he might just as well be in Moscow. He was already in bed every evening, he wrote Nemirovich-Danchenko, at about the time the second act had begun in the Moscow Art Theater. His thoughts were there and on Olga. "Ask Olga to stay with us at Yalta all summer," he pressed Masha, "for it is dull without her. I'll pay her a salary." (December 1, 1899.) For some weeks, in fact, he had been suggesting and then virtually demanding that the whole Moscow Art Theater take a tour to the south in the spring and offer performances at Sevastopol and Yalta. To Nemirovich-Danchenko he promised to talk over with him the possibility of a new play he had in mind, to be called The Three Sisters, but it could be discussed only with him and the troupe at Yalta. An affirmative decision finally came, and he rejoiced. He would see Olga in the spring!
chapter xxii
"My Dear Enchanting Actress"
Chekhov received a telegram from Moscow dated January 17, 1900:
gathered together in a friendly group at the kind invitation of tiie hostess on the day of anthony the great, we drink to the health of a cherished writer and a pushkin academician. It was signed by Masha, Olga Knipper, the Lavrovs, Lika, Goltsev, Levitan, and Cousin Yegorushka from Taganrog. Earlier that evening Masha had taken Lika to a performance of The Sea Gull, the first she had seen since the failure of the opening at Petersburg. Lika wept as the play revived sad memories of her futile love for Chekhov and her unhappy affair with Potapenko.1