When in the first week of December Chekhov suffered a severe attack, accompanied by hemorrhages, this whole terrible question of her career was poignantly revived for Olga. He wrote her of his condition and then rather plaintively added: "I'm not expecting you for the holidays, indeed you must not come here, my darling. Do your work and one of these days we'll be able to be together. I bless you, my little girl. Be calm and keep well." (December 11, 1901.) Frightened, she wrote him: "Anton, I beg you, don't think of a trip to Moscow, watch
15 This attitude is supported by a statement which Chekhov's brother Ivan made to L. Ya. Gurevich: "Olga Leonardovna wanted to leave the stage but Anton Pavlovich would not permit it, saying that to live without activity, without work, is impossible." out for your health. I'm hellishly low in spirits. Be patient until the spring, and I'll be there with you all the time and in the winter we'll go to some warm region and I'll be all yours, yours, and I'll look after you and you will be well and calm. And we'll have that tiny being whom we'll adore — that is for certain, I want it." Two days later she wrote to announce her intention of taking him abroad for a whole year. "It is necessary to make arrangements and to change my life. In a year I'll leave the theater."
Chekhov kept her posted on his improvement. Occasionally he dropped a note of regret that she was not in Yalta: "There is no more blood-spitting, I have more strength, almost no cough, and the only trouble is a huge compress on my right side. And if you only knew how I think of you, how I regret that you are not with me when I have to put on this enormous thing and when I seem to myself so alone and helpless. But this, of course, is not for long; as soon as the compress is on, then I'm all right again. ... I love you, my puppy, I love you very much, and I miss you terribly. It even seems to me improbable that we'll ever see each other again. Without you, I'm good for nothing. My darling, I kiss you hard, I embrace you a hundred times. I sleep excellently, but I don't reckon it as sleep when my sweet wife is not beside me." (December 18, 1901.)16
But Olga was swamped at the theater. She wrote him only that she now felt more calm because Masha had arrived at Yalta for the holidays and would be with him, "Although I'm jealous," she added. "Do you understand this?" Then suddenly, two days before Christmas, she was overwhelmed by an attack of guilt. How she regretted now not being there to change the comprcsses, to feed him, and nuisc him! "I can imagine how you have suffered! I give you my word that this is the last year, my dear, that it will be so! I'll do everything to make your life pleasant, cozy, and not lonely, and you'll see how fine it will be with me, and you'll write, work. In your heart you probably blame me for a lack of love for you. Is it so? You blame me that I don't give up the theater, because I'm not a wife to you. I can imagine what your mother thinks of me! And she is right, right! Anton, my own, forgive me, giddy fool that I am, and don't think too badly about me. You, perhaps,
16 The last sentence is omitted in the Soviet edition of his complete works and letters, but is included in Perepiska A. P. Chekhova i O. L. Knipper, Moscow, 1934, II, 159.
regret that you married me; tell me, don't be afraid to tell me frankly. I feel myself terribly cruel. Tell me what to do?"
But he had nothing to offer as emotional as she perhaps hoped by way of answering her outburst. Quite characteristically, he replied: "You are silly, darling. In the whole time that I've been married, I've never once reproached you about the theater, but on the contrary I'm glad that you've been busy, that you have an object in life, and that you don't aimlessly knock about like your husband. . . . Well, you sloven, good-by, take care of yourself! Don't you dare be depressed and take on meek airs. Laugh. I embrace you and I'm sorry that's all." (December 29, 1901.) And the next day he wrote: "I'm dull without you. Tomorrow I shall go to bed at nine o'clock in the evening in order not to see in the New Year. I haven't you, which means that I have nothing and so I need nothing." Perhaps he recalled wryly now what he had told Suvorin six years ago: that he would be a splendid husband if he could find "a wife who, like the moon, will not appear in my sky every day."
chapter xxv
"We Are Both Incomplete People"
Without his effulgent moon, the Yalta sky now held no further attraction for Chekhov. The town had beeome his prison and Dr. Alt- schuler his jailer. The good physician, whose sole concern was his patient's health, was caught in the crossfire of a loving couple whom he seemed to be keeping apart. In their yearning for each other, both at times made a whipping boy of him. On January 9, 1902, Olga wrote Altschuler and requested him to tell her confidentially and frankly about Chekhov's condition. "I've somehow been thinking," she declared, "that Anton Pavlovich's health is in a better state than it really is, and I've been imagining that it would be possible for him to spend at least three winter months in Moscow. Indeed, January and February are bad in Yalta. But now, of course, I don't mention the subject in my letters."
Altschuler complied and gave Olga a elear account of her husband's illness, although he probably did not say anything of his suspicion that the disease had gone too far to be stopped. At this very time, however, Olga was excitedly writing Chekhov about the advice she was obtaining from Moscow doctors, all of whom agreed with her that Chekhov could live in or near the city in the winter provided he submitted to this or that form of treatment, lliough Chekhov's own complaints about Yalta were somewhat responsible for Olga's zeal in this respect, he explained to her: "You never cease pressing me to come to Moscow. My dear, I would have come long ago, but they won't permit it. Altschuler won't even let me go out in bad weather, though I did go out today as I was sick to death of being cooped up inside." (January 13, 1902.)
Through Olga's lengthy letters to him at Yalta, Chekhov lived vicariously, as it were, her absorbing Moscow life of theater, concerts, art exhibitions, endless rounds of parties, and visits from mutual friends. At times she displayed a certain insensitivity to the restraints which illness placed upon him, in her detailed descriptions of the rich meals, dancing, and tippling she indulged in. She basked in the reflected glory of his name while making a name for herself, and distinguished people sought her out and extended courtesies because she was Chekhov's wife. Though he wanted her to be gay and happy, and encouraged her to live a full life, he sometimes worried over what he regarded as excesses. Yet his criticism, as usual, was cast in the form of light reflections: "My prodigal wife, do sit at home for even'one short week and go to bed in good time! Staying up every night to from three to six o'clock in the morning — well, if you go on like that you'll soon grow old, withered, and bad-tempered." (January 7, 1902.) Olga explained that she could not sit at home when he was not there with her.
Masha looked with a more critical eye on the way Olga combined her exacting work in the theater with parties that lasted into the early hours of the morning. Continuing to live with Olga in Moscow was not an unmixed blessing for Masha, though she apparently obtained some emotional satisfaction out of being so close a part of the life of Chekhov's wife. In serving her — Masha was constantly at Olga's beck and call in the apartment — she believed she was serving her beloved brother. But it must have saddened Masha to be on the receiving end of outbursts of weeping when Chekhov occasionally failed to maintain his pace of almost a daily letter to Olga; Masha herself now felt fortunate if she got a postcard from him once a month. On the other hand, it angered Olga when she learned by chance that her sister-in- law was privy to confidences from Chekhov of which she knew nothing.