He was glad that she was well and in good spirits, Chekhov told her in one letter, for it made his heart lighter. "And I have a terrible desire now that you should give birth to a little half-German who would amuse you and make your life fuller. You ought to, my darling! What do you think?" (November 2, 1901.) And when she informed him that her old nurse had asked for the job of taking care of her children, he replied that he favored it. "It seems to me that you would be very fond of a little half-German and would perhaps love him more than anything in the world, and that is just what is needed." (November 22, 1901.)
But she had to report to him, at the end of almost six months of marriage, "Once again, Anton, we shall not have a little half-German. I'm sorry. Yet why do you think this little half-German will make my life more full? Truly, do you not make it full enough for me?"
They tried to assuage mutual discontent by recounting the cheerful trivialities of their life apart from each other. Chekhov urged her to be merry, for when she was depressed, he said, she became old and faded, and when gay, she was an angel. And she regaled him with accounts of the politics of the Art Theater, rehearsals, performances, her great success in Nemirovich-Danchenko's play In Dreams, the many callers at her apartment, including Kuprin and Bunin, and the merry parties she and the actors had which sometimes lasted till the reviews appeared in the morning. In the gloom and sadness of his "exile," he told her that he loved such parties: "You write that on the evening of December eighth you were half drunk. Ah, darling, how I envy you, if you only knew! I envy your spirit, freshness, your health, temperament, I envy you because 110 hindrances such as hemorrhages and so forth prevent you from drinking. In the old days I could drink, as they say, with the best." (December 13, 1901.) Then, suddenly ashamed of the contrast she had forced between their respective capacities for pleasure, she dismissed these gay gatherings as sheer "madness." And by way of compensation she reminded him that he was a famous author whose very next work she anticipated with awe and trembling. "Do you know," she wrote: "that every time I go or drive past Opitts,14 I always look at your portrait, and I smile and say to myself, 'Hello, Anton,' and I'm happy that you look at me. Am I a silly?"
At times in her letters Olga drifts into what she calls "philosophizing," passages in which she deprecates her lack of culture, her failure to read enough, or she complains of her loss of faith in herself and of her inadequacy as an actress. They seemed designed, in part, to provoke an outpouring of profound thoughts and weighty moral aphorisms which Olga apparently imagined were constantly at the beck and call of a great writer. Her husband, however, rarely reacted, perhaps because he felt that these attempts were not entirely sincere, and this failure annoyed her. Crossly she arraigned him: "You never want to tell me anything and you write as though from habit. Only you interest me. I wish to know your soul, all your spiritual world, what is being created there —or is this said too boldly and is entrance there forbidden?" And she accused him of being distant with her. His only reply to this sort of approach was: "You ask why I keep you at a distance from me. How silly, child!" (December 12,1901.)
However, the question "When shall we get together?" appeared with agonizing iteration in their daily correspondence. Early in November Chekhov began planning to return to Moscow in January instead of in spring. He tried to justify the move by his work. "I'm writing, working," he told Olga, "but, my darling, I cannot work in Yalta, I can't, just can't. It is far from the world, uninteresting, and above all it is
14 The owner of a photographer's shop on Petrovka Street in Moscow.
cold." (November 17, 1901.) She eagerly encouraged the plan if it only did not harm his health. How could she get through the winter without him? she asked. Besides, the new apartment she and Masha had taken — they had moved again — was warm. He could remain indoors and work in the study she had fixed up for him. Though he tried to find doctors who would support the idea, he had to admit finally that they firmly discouraged it.
Then Olga excitedly proposed that she come to Yalta for Christmas. For days they lived on this hope. It would be a heaven-sent blessing for him, he declared. "Do me this favor, my darling, I entreat you!" He even threatened to break with the Art Theater if the directors did not give her permission. But permission was not granted, she had sadly to inform him. The holiday season was the theater's "bread-and-butter period" and her services were absolutely required.
The unspoken cause of their separation constantly shadowed Olga's thoughts — her career as an actress which kept her in Moscow for the greater part of the year. Yet the social mores of the time demanded that she be at her husband's side. Chekhov's frequent expressions of loneliness in his letters, and his declarations that life was passing so stupidly, she could not fail to regard as accusations against her and her career, although he apparently did not intend them as such.
On November 6 she decided to bring the question out into the open by writing to him: "I want to be with you, I abuse myself for not giving up the stage. I really don't know what is happening to me and this vexes me. It is unclear to me. It makes me ill to think that you are alone, distressed and lonely, while I'm concerned here with some ephemeral business instead of surrendering to the feeling that is in me. What prevents me?! How I would like to have that little half-German, An- tonka!"
More than three weeks later, however, detecting in his correspondence what she imagined was a personal criticism against the Art Theater, she firmly wrote him: "You are dispirited, in a foul mood, and hate the theater because of me. Yet it was the theater that brought us together. Darling, banish your dejection, it is not worth it."
Then, Chekhov's very reticence on the subject drew from her, on December 4, a frank expression of what appears to have been her real views on the tormenting problem of whether or not she should give up her profession: "It would be better to scold me, to say that you arc dissatisfied with life, that instead of being such a ridiculous wife I ought to be living with you. I agree. Of course I've behaved thoughtlessly. I had always hoped that your health would permit you to live in Moscow at least part of the winter. But it is not working out this way, my Antonchik! Tell me what I ought to do. Without my work I would utterly bore you. I would pace the room from corner to corner and nag at everything. I've now become completely unaccustomed to an idle life, and to destroy what I've achieved with so much difficulty is not wise at my age. I feel any number of reproachful eyes on me: Why don't I abandon the stage, how can I permit you to languish there all alone, etc. ... All this I know, all, my dear, and therefore I've been silent in much, particularly with you. And I don't know why I reveal this now."
If Chekhov in his love for Olga and because of his loneliness and growing dependence had wanted her to give up her career for him, he would have been the last to tell her so. He had too much rcspect for the dignity of work and the independence of the individual. In fact, his present distress was rooted precisely in the absence of those conditions for himself. He was not a free man; his poor health prevented him from working and from being with his wife when he so desired. When she first mentioned her concern, he replied, perhaps with a gleam of hope, but nevertheless with caution: "You want to give up the theater? So it seemed to me when I read your letter. Do you want it? You must think it over thoroughly, darling, thoroughly, and only then decide. All next winter I'll spend in Moscow — keep that in mind." (November 7, 1901.) Then four days later he warned her: ""There is no sense in your quitting the stage for the kind of dreariness that we now have in Yalta."15