During these early winter months Chekhov alone, or sometimes
Б V. V. Rozanov's connection with New Times aroused Chekhov's animosity.
6 Chekhov's disapproval of Merezhkovsky's views and the political company he kept did not prevent him that year from recommending this distinguished poet and critic for election to the Academy of Sciences.
accompanied by Gorky, paid several visits to the seventy-threc-year- olcl Tolstoy. His doctors had ordered him to South Russia, where he occupicd the estate of Countess S. V. Panina at Gaspra, only some seven miles from Yalta. In fact, when Gorky left Chekhov's house, he rented a dacha for himself and family at Oleiz, which was only a long walk from Gaspra. Chekhov would collect Gorky 011 the way and they would procccd to Gaspra to attend the "court" of the ailing Tolstoy, perhaps the most celebrated man in the world at that time.
Tolstoy seemed to be pleased with his coming, Chekhov wrote Olga of one of his visits, was friendly and kind, listened with pleasure, and conversed readily. With Gorky there, the three foremost Russian men of letters at that time had come together. Tolstoy matched Chekhov's reverence for him with a profound admiration for the personality and art of this man who was more than thirty years his junior. "He loved Chekhov," Gorky noted in his reminiscences, "and always when he looked at him his eyes, tender at that moment, seemed to caress Chekhov's face. Once, when Chekhov was walking along a garden path with Alexandra Lvovna,7 Tolstoy, still ill at the time, was sitting in an armchair on the terrace, and he seemed to stretch toward them, saying in a whisper: 'Ah, what a dear, beautiful man; he is modest and quiet, just like a girl! And he walks like a girl. He's simply wonderful!' " However, Tolstoy suspected him of being an atheist, a fault that he commented on unfavorably to his disciple Chertkov.
Perhaps amused by Chekhov's shyness in a discussion about women, Tolstoy confronted him with a question, phrased in the coarse peasant language which he sometimes used on his guests: "Did you whore a great deal in your youth?" And while Chekhov tugged at his beard and mumbled something inaudible, Tolstoy went on to tell how indefatigable he had been in that pursuit as a young man.
But mostly their discussions on these visits were about literature. It delighted Chekhov to hear Tolstoy rail against contemporary writers, and especially the Russian ones. He regarded them all as children, Chekhov told Bunin, and their works as child's play. "But Shakespeare is another matter," Chekhov perceptively observed. "He was an adult, exasperating him because he didn't write a la Tolstoy." The trouble with modern writers, Tolstoy complained, was that they were not at all Russian in their thought and wrote in a language incomprehensible
7 Tolstoy's youngest daughter.
to him. "Now you," lie said, turning to Chekhov, "you arc Russian. Yes, very, very Russian."
One day, Gorky recalls, the company listened as Tolstoy spoke with rapture about The Darling. " 'It is like lace,' he said, 'made by a chaste young girl; there were such laccmakcrs in olden times who used to depict all their lives, all their dreams of happiness in the pattern. They dreamed in designs of all that was dear to them, wove all their pure, uncertain love into their lacc.' Tolstoy spoke with emotion, with tears in his eyes. That day Chekhov was running a temperature, and he sat there with a deep flush on his checks, his head bowed, carefully wiping his spectacles. For a long time lie remained silent, and then, sighing deeply, he said in a low, bashful voice: 'There arc many misprints in it . . .' "
Bunin insists that a hemorrhage suffered by Chekhov late that winter was due in part to the agitation caused by the sudden news of the serious illness of Tolstoy who had come to Yalta to visit his daughter.
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Chekhov's marriage affected Lika and Lidiya Avilova in different ways. Masha occasionally saw Lika in Moscow and the reports she sent to Chekhov suggest that her old friend was now neither happy nor above reproach. She had failed as an opera singer, abandoned her idea of opening a millinery shop, and lasted only one season as a worker in the Art Theater. Several months after Chekhov's marriage, Masha wrote him a note upon arriving in Moscow from her vacation at Yalta. "I had to spend the night with the Knippers," she informed him. "My apartment was occupied and smclled to heaven of tobacco smoke and liquor. I pity Lika."
Later that year, in December, Lika was at a rousing party of the Art Theater troupe which was celebrating the premiere of Nemirovich- Danchenko's In Dreams. Olga, in describing the affair to Chekhov, interpolated: "Lika was drunk and constantly pestered me to drink Briiderschaft, but I wiggled out of it for I don't like this sort of thing. I don't know her, find her utterly strange, and feel no particular attraction to her." Chekhov, however, understood the inebriated Lika's misplaced gesture toward his wife. Г1Ъс next year, when Olga announced to him, with something of a snickcr, that Lika was marrying A. A. Sanin, then an assistant director of the Moscow Art Theater, Chekhov replied: "I've known Lika a long time, and whatever may have happened, she is a good girl, clever and decent. She'll not get along with Sanin, will not love him . . . probably within a year she'll have a bouncing baby, and in a year and a half she'll begin to be unfaithful to her husband. Well, it is all a question of fate." (March 12, 1902.)8 Perhaps at that moment he recalled the inscription on Lika's photograph which she had sent to him several years before: "To dear Anton Pavlovich, a grateful token of remembrances of precious relations. Lika." And she quoted several lines from the popular contemporary poet, A. N. Apukhtin:
Whether my days be bright or sad, Whether I vanish soon, my life spent, One thing I know — to the very end My thoughts, feelings, songs, and efforts — All are for thee!
And she added: "If this inscription compromises you, I'll be glad. . . . I could have written it eight years ago, but I write it now, and I'll write it ten years hence." No, his beautiful Lika would never forget him.
Some two months before Chekhov's marriage, when Olga was in Petersburg with the Art Theater, she received a note from Lidiya Avilova, who asked to sec her.9 The meeting never took place, for Olga, assuming that her correspondent, like so many others, merely wanted free tickets for The Three Sisters, answered with a polite note of regrets. However, Olga mentioned the matter to Chekhov, for she guessed that he must know the lady. Shortly after, on March 16, he jokingly queried: "Are you seeing Avilova? ... No doubt you have already begun writing tales and novels on the sly. If I find out that you have, then good-by, I shall get a divorce." The tone of the query suggests the unimportance which he had always attached to Avilova's baffling pursuit of him, an incident in his life about which he had apparently said
During that summer Lika with her husband visited Yalta when Chekhov was away. Masha saw much of them and, contrary to her brother's prognostication, found them a rather congenial married couple.
Though neither here nor elsewhere does Olga give any indication of having previously known her, Avilova, in her memoirs, claims that as young girls in Moscow they acted together in amateur theatricals. Avilova writes that Olga was "an inconspicuous, shy, silent young girl." On the other hand, the director predicted that Avilova, according to her account, would have a great career as an actress if she went on the stage. This passage appears only in the i960 edition of Avilova's "A. P. Chekhov in My Life" in A. P. Chekhov v vospominaniyakh sovremennikov (A. P. Chekhov in the Remembrances of Contemporaries), Moscow, i960, p. 229.