When the fine Yalta early spring weather camc, Dr. Altschulcr allowed Chekhov to go into town and walk by the seashore. His spirits rose somewhat. But he was more contented when working around his garden. Sadly lie observed how the slightest effort tired him. For the most part lie had to be satisfied with superintending Arscny in planting the German and Japanese iris bulbs he had ordered. More often he just sat by the hour on his favorite bench, gazing into the distance at the sea.
Chekhov now unreasonably hated Yalta, perhaps because it was associated with the one thing he wanted most to forget — his disease. Ceaselessly he planned for the future when he knew that he had no future. The feeling that some cxpcriencc, some pleasure was escaping him through enforced inaction gnawed at him. He kept writing to Olga repeatedly: "We have not much life before us together ... we must hurry, we must do our utmost to get something out of it"; "Don't forget me, you know we have only a little life left"; "You know it is wearing, it is fiendishly dreary! I want to live!"
Olga mentioned that she envied his even disposition and he replied that he was naturally hot-tempered but that over the years he had learned to control himself as he believed every decent man ought to do. Shortly after making this observation, he flew into a temper over Olga's failure to communicate promptly her new address — she and Masha had once again moved, taking a larger apartment that had a sunny, airy room where Chekhov could write undisturbed when he camc to Moscow. The exacerbation with which he returned again and again to this minor matter betrayed the explosive tension induced by his long and hopeless struggle with tuberculosis. The offended Olga's protest that she had told him the address resulted in the angry threat that he would bring all her letters to Moscow and prove that she had never once given him the information.
But Olga was all he had left, the one tangible symbol of his future, and he concentrated on her with pathetic avidity, as though he must cheat time and drain the last drop from this remaining experience with life. When she feared that she was becoming old and ugly, he assured her that if she grew a nose like a crane's he would still love her and hug her until her ribs cracked. In answer to her teasing charge that he seemed to prefer Yalta and his friends there to her and Moscow, he replied that he wanted to be only with his wife and would live with her any place, even in Archangel, and would worry about nothing if only she were a mother.
In fact, Chekhov had begun planning their next meeting as soon as he returned to Yalta. He would come in March. They would rent a dacha near Moscow, and in June they would travel abroad to Switzerland, Italy, France. His imagination soared at the prospects. Then Dr. Altschuler informed him that his pleurisy was not thoroughly healed and forbade Moscow in March. Could she not obtain a vacation and come to Yalta for Easter? — Chekhov pleaded — If her entreaties were in vain, he promised to use his own influence on the directors of the Art Theater. "Think of what is best and most convenient for you," he wrote. "But I'm so dreary, I so yearn to see you that I have no patience left. I beg and beg you to come." (March 5, 6,1903.)
Olga, however, had to go to Petersburg again on tour with the Art Theater. It would be quite impossible to get away before they left. His glorious bubble of enthusiasm deflated, he guiltily asserted that she was a busy, hard-working person while he loafed about like any whipper- snapper. Therefore, he would come himself, without any more talk, no matter what the doctor said.
«3»
The agonizing proccss of dissolution had also begun to affect Chekhov's writing habits and he could not reconcile himself to this fact. "Oh, what a mass of subjects there are in my head!" he exclaimed to Olga. "And how I long to write! But I feel that something is lacking — cither in my surroundings or in the state of my health." (January 23, 1903.) Yet less than a month later he confessed to her: "Ah, my darling, let me tell you sinccrely of the satisfaction it would now give me to ccase being a writer!" (February 16, 1903.) Despite his physical incapacity, pride and will power drove him on to overcome insuperable obstacles. He continued to peck away slowly at The Bethrothed, a tablcspoonful cach hour, he told his wife. "I write six or seven lines a day, I can't do more even if my life depended on it. I have diarrhea daily. . . ." (February 5, 1903.) Repeatedly he had to offer excuses to the editor for not sending the tale in when agreed, because he could not find the strength to make a fair copy of it.
Chekhov had worked intermittently on The Betrothed, a short story of less than twenty printed pages, for some five months. And after he turned it in to the editor on February 27, it took him another four months to corrcct the three sets of proof he demanded, in the course of which he accumulated more pages of revision than were in the original draft.1 This last tale that Chekhov wrote is another of his little masterpieces, a study in the formation of the character of Nadya, a charming Russian girl. Like her meek, widowed mother, Nadya never questions the way of life of her stuffy provincial home, which is dominated by her grandmother. Her comfortable existence, the daily routine of pleasures, visitors, and entertainment, the servants who wait on her and sleep on the floor of a vermin-infested kitchcn — all is accepted by Nadya as a matter of course. Eventually, however, the persistent prodding of Sasha, a distant relative from the city who has turned his back on middle-class values, begins to arouse in Nadya a spirit of rebellion against the crassncss and fecklessness of her life. Finally she abandons her impending marriage to a shallow nonentity and runs away to Petersburg to study, filled now with the desire to be
1 The story did not appear in print until December, 1903, in The Journal for All.
of some use to herself and to society. One can discern no lineaments of Olga Knipper in Nadya, but Sasha, like Chekhov, burgeoning with hope for the future, makes light of his illness, goes to the Volga to take a kumiss cure, and dies of tuberculosis.
As though seeking an advance reaction to a new emphasis in his fiction, Chekhov took the unusual step for him of asking Gorky, Veresaev, and Elpatievsky to read the proof sheets of The Betrothed. Years later Veresaev recalled that in this form Chekhov had his heroine seeking a change in her life by entering the revolutionary movement. Veresaev must have been mistaken, for now all the variants of the story are available and they contain no such development of the plot. The version he did read, however, has expressions of revolutionary sentiments, especially in Sasha's talks with Nadya, which Chekhov omitted in the final draft, no doubt because of concern over censorship. Perhaps such sentiments, and the fact that in those days the revolutionary movement was the accepted outlet for young people who sought a change in their life, account for Veresaev's faulty memory of the tale.
Certainly Chekhov seemed to be trying in The Betrothed to avoid the note of gloom and futility with which he so often concluded the tales of his middle period. While he was working on it he told his wife: "You write, read it through, and see that this has already been done, that it is old, old. There ought to be something new, a little pleasantly acid." (February 23, 1903.) The direction he tried to give his story was not exactly revolutionary, but more in keeping with that in The Three Sisters and later in The Cherry Orchard. It was the gradualism that he espoused in his later years, the conviction that society was slowly and surely moving toward an order of things that would deliver men from want, injustice, and fear. When the emancipated Nadya returns from the university to visit her provincial town, it seems to her that everything in it has grown old and out of date and is only waiting for something young and fresh. "Oh if that new, brighter life would only come quickly," she exclaims, "then one would be able to look one's fate boldly in the face, to know that one was right, and to be happy and free! And sooner or later such a life will come!"