After lunch the actors and writers, on foot and in carriages, set out for Chekhov's house at Autka. The beaming host greeted them all warmly. 'ITiey found the tables set for tea, loaded with delicacies. The company sauntered in the garden, sat 111 the study, or in the glassed-in terrace filled with recent magazines, newspapers, and books. In one corner a literary dispute went on, in another the talented Bunin kept listeners roaring at his humorous anccdotes, Gorky was the center of
3 Present at the time were the following figures in the artistic world, most of them widely known: I. A. Bunin, E. N. Chirikov, S. Ya. Elpatievsky, Maxim Gorky, A. I. Kuprin, B. A. Lazarevsky, D. N. Mamin-Sibiryak, V. S. Mirolyubov, S. V. Rachmaninoff, "Skitalets," (S. G. Petrov —See Chapter XXV, Note 4), К. M. Stanyukovicb N. D. Teleshov, A. M, Vasnetsov, still a third group, and some of the young actors in the garden competed to see who could throw stones the farthest. Chekhov's face was transformed. He acted as though he had been reborn. Here were the gaiety and movement he loved. Stanislavsky recalled how their happy host, his hands behind his back, or constantly removing and replacing his pince-nez, moved from group to group, talking with everyone. With a kind of childish naivete, he spoke to all of the thing that attracted him most at the moment. And, during the ten days the Moscow Art Theater was at Yalta, this gay company of actors and writers made a daily pilgrimage to Chekhov's for lunch or tea, creating their own atmosphere of mingled jollity and seriousness, of art and poetry until, like one happy family, they ended by idealistically planning to make an annual event of this gathering and to build a house to accommodate all these kindred spirits.
Uncle Vanya was the opening play on April 16. Overdressed ladies and cavaliers of Moscow and Petersburg, teachers, civil servants from neighboring provincial towns, local citizens and consumptives made up the audience. Chekhov's mother, digging out of her trunk an ancient silk dress, insisted on attending. The picture of her sitting in a box in her frayed gown, seeing her son's play for the first time, struck Chekhov as agonizingly sentimental and upset his nerves. Though the town park band always seemed to come in with a march or polka at just the most tragic moments of the play, the performance was hailed as a great success and Chekhov was accorded an ovation.
He appears not to have attended most of the other plays, but he was present at a special performance of dramatic readings which he persuaded the company to offer on behalf of his Board of Guardians for Visiting the Sick. However, he felt obliged to come to an extra and final performance of The Sea Gull presented in his honor. This was turned into a personal triumph with a prolonged ovation and the presentation of a scroll signed by almost two hundred local citizens and many distinguished visitors. A Yalta female Maecenas tendered a farewell luncheon to the whole company on the roof of her palatial home, and the Moscow Art Theater, as a parting gift, gave Chekhov for his garden the bench and swing that had been used in Uncle Vanya. Either then or a little later Chekhov presented gold medallions to the casts of The Sea Gull and Uncle Vanya. The medallions were made up in the form of books, the front inscribed with the titles of the plays and the author's name. On the reverse side the name of the actor was engraved. The book opened up and on the left the role or roles of the actor appeared, and on the right was set a miniature copy of the photograph which had been taken of Chekhov and the cast of The Sea Gull. On the back of Nemirovich-Danchenko's medallion was engraved: "You gave my Sea Gull life. Thanks!" The company left Yalta with the pleasantest memories, more devoted than ever to Chekhov, and Stanislavsky left with the precious promise from him that he would definitely have another play for their next season.
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Chekhov confessed to the need of rest after two weeks of going to bed at three or four in the morning and the strain of dining constantly in the company of large groups. But Yalta now seemed more dull and empty than ever. By the beginning of May the momentum of the recent excitement carried him on, in an act of truancy, to its source — to Moscow and Olga. She had had to return with the company to do some rehearsing before the regular summer vacation set in, but her letters to him were filled with nostalgic yearning for the happiness she had left behind. He could have seen very little of her at Moscow, however, for the delayed illness caught up with him, and in less than two weeks he was back in Yalta, leaving a record of having talked with reporters at a championship wrestling match on the virtues of physical prowess, and of having visited the seriously ill Levitan. "My dear, enchanting actress," he wrote Olga on his return, "I was very unwell on the way back to Yalta. In Moscow I had a bad headache and a fever, and it was sinful to conceal this from you, but I feel pretty well now." (May 20,1900.)
Chekhov soon felt well enough to succumb to the blandishments of Gorky about the beauties of the Caucasus. For at the beginning of June, along with Gorky, a physician friend A. N. Aleksin, the celebrated artist V. M. Vasnetsov, and Dr. L. V. Sredin, who joined the group later, he took a tour of two weeks through parts of this picturesque region. (There is some evidence that Chekhov and Olga had a plan to meet at Batum on this trip.) The group traveled into Vladikavkaz along the Georgian Military Road to Tiflis. After visiting monasteries in the area, they left for the return trip. On the train from Tiflis to Batum, by one of those inexplicable coincidences, they met Olga and her mother on the way to a short vacation in the Caucasus, and they traveled together for six hours before she had to change trains. (The plan of Olga and Chekhov to get together seems to have been dropped because of her mother's decision to accompany her on the trip.)
Shortly after Chekhov's return to Yalta, Gorky tried to entice him on another trip — to a little paradise, a village on the Psyol, a river of pleasant memory to Chekhov from the days when he visited the Lintvarevs. It was quiet, urged Gorky, except for the Ukrainian frogs which have such melodious voices, and no one would disturb him. Chekhov resisted. Next Gorky, whom Chekhov had been treating to his favorite advice to young writers to travel the world — to India, for example — suddenly turned on him with an invitation to accompany him to China, where he wished to play the part of a correspondent in the Boxer Rebellion. But Chekhov countered, quite correctly, that the war was almost over. If it continued, however, he assured Gorky that he would go as an army doctor.
However, he had no intention of going anywhere at that point, for at the beginning of July Olga Knipper arrived at Yalta to spend the remainder of her summer vacation with the Chekhov family. The visit had been planned for some time, as though they sensed an urgent need to be together to seek an answer to the ultimate question that had been gnawing at both of them. They had known each other now for almost two years, but their relations had been confined largely to correspondence. Olga felt more and more that she was being forced into the unfeminine position of a wooer, and at times she grew angry over his seeming inability to understand the import of her depressed feelings. But this wonderfully perceptive analyst of the heart of a woman understood only too well. To respond openly was alien to his peculiar sensitivities and the whole emotional pattern of his life. Something had to be released first, and then there would be such an outpouring as would gladden the heart of any loving woman. Meanwhile, he was treating Olga to his customary tactics of advance and retreat.