His mood frightened Olga. She had written Chekhov on August 28 to scold him for not telling her that he had left Lyubimovka because he had been coughing up blood — a reason that he now gave. This lack of frankness, she declared, could mean only one thing, "that we have lived together long enough. Is it time to part? Fine." Then, softening a bit, she alluded to the problem of her career which, she suspected, was
9 The actual contents of Olga's letter to Masha are unknown.
at the bottom of all this contention. "In general, we are making a mess out of our life. My God, if I only knew that you needed me, that I could help you live, that you would feel happy if I were always near you! If you could only give me that assurance! However, you are able to live with me and never utter a word. Sometimes I've felt myself superfluous. I think that you need me only as an agreeable woman, and that as a human being I am lonely and a stranger to you."
The quarrel revealed that Olga's insight into her husband's enigmatic nature was at times extremely perceptive. With some truth she discerned that he really experienced no need to share himself and was inclined to look upon the daily lives of others quite indifferently. And she was aware of his fundamental discontent with whatever happened to be his situation at any given time, but her failure to understand the reasons for these baffling moods troubled her. "Sometimes," she told him, "it seems to me that it is entirely all the same to you where you live," and in this she was largely correct. No doubt Olga's belief that continuous living with Chekhov would make her insufferable to him was one of the factors that led her to hesitate to give up the stage. She could not escape the implication of his remark — a kind of casual justification for leaving Lyubimovka — that after all he had been with her constantly since early spring. "You, indeed, are an eminently fidgety person," she wrote him. "You are constantly bored. It seems to me that if I were together with you all the time, you would grow cold to me, or you would become as accustomed to me as to a table or a chair. Am I right? We are both somehow incomplete people." She would have realized how right she was if she had been aware of that statement to Suvorin that he wanted a wife who, like the moon, would not appear in his sky every day. And whether or not she would have complied, it obviously hurt Olga that he did not insist on her giving up the stage.
In certain respects, they were singularly different — Olga, like her family, temperamental, outgoing, fun-loving, at one moment soaring, at the next in the depths; Chekhov, though he admired some of these qualities, and had early revolted against the reserve and caution of his shopkeeper family, was nevertheless inherently withdrawn, self-contained, and disliked demonstrativeness, a behavior pattern now intensified by the state of his health. It is clear from her letters that Olga was a bit irritated by his failure to react positively to her frequent comments about the way Stanislavsky, Morozov, Nemirovich-Danchenko, and Vishnevsky flirted with her. In fact, he could see for himself that Nemirovich-Danchenko and particularly Vishnevsky were constantly dancing attendance upon her. If he experienced a twinge, he passed it all off in jokes about her pursuers, or he would plaintively say for effect in his letters . . Don't drift away from me." Nor could she understand his endless complaints about having too many callers, a situation that ordinarily seemed desirable to Olga with her highly sociable nature. In a palpable hit she twitted him about his visitors: "I've come to the conclusion that you like them and are merely showing off when you say that they vex you." He rather crossly answered: "I don't know whether I'm showing off or not, only I can't work and am sometimes much fatigued by conversation, especially with people I don't know." (August 29, 1902.) Olga would hardly have any sympathy with that trait of his personality which made it peculiarly difficult for him to turn people away.
In some respects their marriage represented a curious reversal of the conventional situation. Olga bantered him about it once in a letter. "You know, Antonka, I am really the husband and you are my wife. I am working, I come to pay visits to my wife, I watch out for her behavior — really, are you not my wife?" She was actually the stronger and more active, and in some aspects of their relations he played a submissive, almost feminine role. In a sense, too, there was a reversal of roles in the familiar situation of sacrifice in marriage. Here the male sacrificed instead of the female. It comes as something of a shock to learn that after almost a year of marriage, he had made no financial arrangement with Olga as her husband. For she was compelled to ask him, with much reluctance, for the sum of five hundred roubles to help pay off a long-standing debt. Rather charmingly, she reminded him, since she proposed to take the money out of his accumulated royalties in the Art Theater, that she had helped to earn it for him. Plainly embarrassed, he told her to draw on the account any time she desired without troubling to ask him.
In the matter of their quarrel, however, Chekhov was every inch the husband. He replied to Olga's acrimonious and rather morbid letter of August 28, pointing out in each case how utterly unfounded were her charges. Someone else had been talking to her, he guessed, and was to blame for all this muddle. "Distrust of my words and actions has been thrust into your head and everything seems suspicious to you, and if that is the case I can do nothing, nothing, nothing at all. Further, I'm not going to try to disabuse or convince you, for it is useless. . . .
My sweet, good darling, you are my wife, understand this once and for alll You are the person nearest and dearest to me. I have loved you infinitely and I still love you, but you go on writing about an 'agreeable' woman, lonely and a stranger to me. Well, God be with you, have it your own way." (September i, 1902.)
Olga melted under this onslaught. The fact that by now she had returned to Moscow and got into the swing of her theatrical work no doubt contributed to her cheerier frame of mind. They were real people and not bloodless esscnccs, she reminded him, and hcncc it was natural that they should suffer small heartaches. But she had not been influenced by anyone, she asserted. No man could encouragc distrust for him in her. At the time she had simply been unable to rcconcilc herself to his departure from Lyubimovka. And as a kind of ultimate peace offering, for Olga realized where she had hurt him most, she informed him that she was placing flowers in Masha's room for her homecoming from Yalta. "What a wickcd, wickcd person I am. . . . When I think of you I always imagine myself on my knees before you, begging forgiveness." Their quarrel could hardly have ended otherwise — they loved each other profoundly. Has her doctor given her leave to have children? — he anxiously queries — "Ah, darling, darling, time is passing!" In a spirit of reconciliation she happily responds that the doctor has told her she has made a complete rccovcry and can do anything. "Are you satisfied? I'll give you a fine son next year."
«7»
A constant irritant in Olga's daily letter to Chekhov was her badgering him on getting ahead with his literary work. She prodded him to create plays and stories in very much the same language that she used to urge him to take castor oil and frequent baths. A clear understanding of the effort involved or the ideal human circumstanccs essential to the creative process were beyond Olga. Occasionally she tried to evince an empathy with his art by expressing provocative critical judgments on literature. The mood of Bunin's story In Autumn, she wrote Chekhov, struck her as well sustained, but Kuprin's tale In the Circus she found boring. And when Anatoly Lunacharsky10 read her his verse drama Temptation, she ecstatically pronounccd it original, bold, and beautifully written. Noting her enthusiasm for this play in his reply, Che-