That release happened on this visit, perhaps in the study with the moonlight streaming in through the big window, his mother and sister asleep in their rooms, or perhaps in his hut at Gurzuf, where they went to listen to the murmuring of the sea. At last Chekhov, at forty, renowned throughout Russia, and in the tragic last stages of tuberculosis, was madly, unalterably in love!
Both drew a veil of secrecy over their life together during this passionate month of intimacy at Yalta. There is hardly any allusion to it in Olga's memoirs. Chekhov wrote very few letters to others during these weeks and never once mentioned her name in them. And he appears to have fended off the many visitors who pursued him. Only two things disturbed his bliss, news of the death of Levitan on July 22, which caused him deep grief —and the unexpected visit of Vera Kommis- sarzhevskaya. This beautiful, sad-eyed actress, now almost at the height of her fame, had written him more than a year ago, when she heard he was ill, to come to Rostov where she knew a specialist who would cure him. Chekhov had thanked her warmly but failed to go. Now, at the beginning of August, being on tour in the south of Russia, she turned up at Gurzuf. They strolled by the seashore, and in her captivating voice she recited poetry to him and Nina's monologue from The Sea Gull. She asked for his photograph, and begged him to remain another day. Chekhov promised both. He gave her his pieture with the inscription: "To Vera Kommissarzhevskaya, August 3, on a stormy day when the sea roared, from the calm Anton Chekhov." But the next day she found that he had left. She could hardly have known that he was deeply in love with another aetress.
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Chekhov accompanied Olga on the return trip as far as Sevastopol. She had to get back to rehearsals for the third season of the Moscow Art Theater. Upon arrival, she wrote him at onee: When was he coming? Of course, he must come. . . . Now the whole tone of their letters changed. It was the correspondence of lovers. He ealled her by her pet name and used the intimate "thou." "My dear, my joy, greetings!" he answered her. "I received your letter today, the first sinee your departure, and I read it and read it again, and here I am writing to you, my aetress." In order to while away the dull hours after she left and before his steamer took off, he told her of going to Balaclava, where he had to hide from "the young ladies there" who reeognized him and wished to arrange a reception. "Now I'm at Yalta, bored, out of sorts, and pining. ... I keep imagining all the time that the door will suddenly open and you will enter." (August 9, 1900.)
For a time letters were exchanged at the rate of about one every other day. They were full of endearments, of longing for each other. "My dear, glorious, and magnificent actress," he wrote on Oetober 13, "I'm alive, well, and I think and dream of you and am lonely without you. ... Be well and happy, my wonderful little German. Don't be depressed, sleep soundly, and write me more often. I kiss you hard, hard, four hundred times." When she skipped a day in writing him, he complained that he had not had a line from her "in ages." Olga tried to soothe him. Don't rage, don't fret, she comforted, for when they saw each other they would forget it all. But when would they get together again? She kept asking him in nearly every other letter.
Olga had much reason to feel depressed, for in the course of some ten weeks after her departure from Yalta Chekhov again and again advanced the date of his rejoining her in Moscow. The principal reason for the delay was The Three Sisters, which he had begun to work on seriously after Olga left. Much pressure was being placed upon him to finish the play in time for the current season of the Moscow Art Theater, and over this period Stanislavsky visited him twice to urge him on. As he told Masha, however, The Three Sisters turned out to be more difficult for him than any of his other plays. He kept Olga fully informed of his progress, for she was as eager as her theater directors that he write the play, and Chekhov wished to create for her one of its richest and most important roles.
Chekhov wrote her, at the beginning of his efforts, that he had got into a scrt of tangle, that there were too many characters and he might have to give it up. Then he had a spurt and felt that he had started well, but he soon cooled off, he declared, and it had all grown cheap to him. "I don't write you," he informed Olga on August 30, "because you must wait a bit, for I'm writing my play. Although it is rather tedious, yet it seems to me all right, it is intellectual. I write slowly —that I did not expect." Some days, he told Olga, he would just sit and sit at his desk and think and think about the play, and then pick up a newspaper. Or, he reported sadly, he had done nothing on it for a whole week and the play looked at him dejectedly as it lay on the table and he thought of it dejectedly. Then one of his heroines had gone a bit lame, he said, and he could do nothing for her.
Chekhov asserted that a play ought to be written without taking a breath, and he actually contemplated finishing a first draft of The Three Sisters in a month. But there was no hope of a month of free, uninterrupted time. "Oh how they break in on me, if you only knew!!! I cannot refuse to see people," he confessed to Olga. "I'm just not equal to it." The poet V. N. Ladyzhensky, visiting Yalta, called on him for ten straight days running, Sofya Malkiel from Moscow spent the night, Sergeenko arrived from Petersburg, the headmistress of the school and: Mme. Bonnier came on problems of the sick, and other local citizens were daily visitors. Chekhov's almost hysterical bitterness now over what had long been a commonplace in his life was no doubt caused by his impatience to finish his play and get to Olga at Moscow. Both she and Masha grew alarmed at the expressions of intense dejection in his letters over these endless interruptions. Masha wrote him not to place too much significance on such matters and it would be easier for him to get along. Olga was more aggressively practical over "these visitors who keep hindering you from working." Day after day, she exclaimed, spent in empty gossip while the play was clamoring to take shape and he became indignant over the delays. Darling, dear one, she demanded, do something to get rid of them so you can work quietly and unhindered.
By the end of August Chekhov began to doubt that he would be able to finish the play at Yalta, and he hinted to Olga that he might come to Moscow and work on it. His mother, however, declared her unwillingness to remain alone. Sympathetic to her wishes, he asked Masha in Moscow to take her in. Masha objected at first; she had sent all her kitchenware to Yalta, was living almost in dormitory style in a tiny new apartment, and she pleaded that Mother would be most uncomfortable there. It was not until the end of September that this difficulty was straightened out and their mother left for Moscow. Meanwhile Chekhov had an attack of influenza and both the play and his trip had to be put off.
Olga tried to understand the reasons behind all these delays in his coming, but her letters now began to reflect despair. If her fears were momentarily assuaged when he told her that he would love her like an Arab, or declared "My sweet Olga, my angel, I'm very very lonely without you," they were again revived when he postponed his arrival week after week. "Why don't you come, Anton?" she burst out in her letter of September 24. "I cannot understand it. I don't write because I'm expecting you all the time, because I want terribly to see you. What's holding you back? What's troubling you? I don't know what to think and I feel dreadfully uneasy. . . . Every day I want to cry."
Olga, with her impetuous, optimistic nature, could not penetrate, at least at this stage in their relations, the terrible secret he bore within him — that circumstances compelled him to dwell more on death than on marriage. With his natural reticence about expressing his inmost thoughts and feelings, the most he could do was to hint, as though he expected her to divine the rest. He did not want to write her, he declared, but to talk and talk on, even be silent with her, only with her. Yet to go to Moscow for that, he added, defied his understanding. "What for?" he asked. "To see you and go away again? How interesting that is. To arrive, look at the theatrical crowd, and once more depart." (September 22, 1900.)