"то moscow, ТО moscow?" / 609
form of travel. The physician, Chekhov reported to Olga, had thrown up his hands in horror when he told him of the sponge baths which she had favored. He forbade them. The cold water and exertion were too much. With his shortness of breath, even to dress himself now was a difficult task. A week later Chekhov wrote to Olga that "your enemy" Altschuler had visited again to prescribe pills to remedy his protracted diarrhea. And he added that "Altschuler had a long talk with me about my illness and spoke most disapprovingly of Ostroumov for allowing me to live in Moscow in the winter. He implored me not to go to Moscow, not to live there. He said that Ostroumov had probably been drunk." (October 2,1903.)
Chekhov's helplessness in his illness elicited from Olga the usual flow of self-denunciations which, however sincere, now annoyed and even angered him. She knew that he was ill, she wrote, and that she must seem to him like a nonentity who came, stayed with him, and then left. There was such horrible falsity in her life — and she concluded that under no circumstance should he come to Moscow. Stop writing such dismal letters, he warned her. He would come anyway, even if he had to live in a hotel, he quipped, for he felt the urge to be immoral. And when she relented and glorified him as her superman, he capped it: "Your superman who runs so often to a super watercloset."
Though the clinical tone now of so many of Chekhov's letters to his wife was an understandable outgrowth of his sickroom existence, much of it must be attributed to his conscientious effort to respond to her incessant catechizing him on his condition and on his daily routine. Often he tried to treat the matter lightly or whimsically. Ferns and fungi were growing all over him, he assured Olga in answer to her obsession on cleanliness. Yet he was painfully conscious of the lack of gaiety in his letters, and more than once deplored their concentration on medical details.
The truth of the matter was that their prolonged daily correspondence, as a kind of surrogate for a normal life together, had reached the point of diminishing returns. This was particularly so in Chekhov's case, where sickness compelled a narrower and narrower daily routine that left nothing to be said that was not repetitious. And the obvious compensation of his intellectual and spiritual world he somehow could not share with Olga.
After Chekhov finished The Cherry Orchard, which had been such an active theme in their correspondence throughout the fall, he felt desperately lonely at Yalta. If illness and Altschuler's advice had not prevented it, he would have left at once for Moscow and Olga. Besides, he very much wanted to be present at the rehearsals of his play. With the greatest impatience he waited for an improvement in his condition, as well as word from Olga that he should come — for they had agreed that she would set the time, depending on the weather in Moscow. Though he admitted that the weather then at Yalta left nothing to be desired, he was stubbornly determined to reject Dr. Altschuler's entreaties and follow Dr. Ostroumov's counsel to stay in Moscow for the winter. Somehow cold did not seem to matter to him any longer.
But the days dragged on into November with little improvement in his health. Besides, reports of both Olga and Masha on Moscow weather were anything but encouraging. Chekhov's exasperation mounted, and he quite humanly took it out on his wife. Why had she not sent him the repertoire of the Art Theater, which he had repeatedly asked for? Or the boots for one of the servants, and the toilet paper? Did she think he was going to wear a fur coat or collar of imitation sealskin? he fumed — over her desire to save money on a fur coat which he had asked her to have made for him in Moscow; surely there was nothing wrong, he expostulated, in his having a fur coat that cost three or four hundred roubles! She was a miser, he charged; and then he wired her to cancel the whole thing.
Chekhov's mother added to his problems at this time, for she fretted over the prospect of remaining at Yalta when he left. Though he thought her behavior arbitrary, he managed with some difficulty to send her to Ivan for a stay in Moscow, convinced that she would soon want to return to Yalta. And now he had to protest guiltily to Masha and Olga that he had not really quarreled with his mother.
With a slight improvement of his condition in the second half of November, Chekhov began irrationally pleading with Olga to tell him to come, as though she were the legislatress of Moscow weather. He threatened to cease writing to her, to go abroad. Did she not know that it was revolting to live at Yalta, and that thanks to its water and excellent air he had to be on the trot all day? He would live on nothing but lentils, he wrote, and get up respectfully whenever Nemirovich- Danchenko and Vishnevsky came into the room, if only she would summon him. "I'm impatiently waiting for the day and hour when my wife will finally permit me to come to Moscow," he wrote Stanislavsky on November 23. "I now begin to suspect that she is up to some trick or
"то MOSCOW, TO MOSCOW!" / 611
other. The weather here is calm, warm, remarkable; but when one recalls Moscow and the Sandunov baths,10 all this delight seems stale and useless to anyone. I sit in my study and keep-looking at the telephone. I receive my telegrams by telephone and am expecting every minute to be summoned at last to Moscow."
Two days before, he had written to Olga: "There's no news. I'm writing nothing, for I keep waiting for you to order me to pack and travel to Moscow. To Moscow, to Moscow! That is not said by THREE SISTERS but by ONE HUSBAND. I embrace my little turkey."
In a few days his little turkey finally gave him the signal. Chekhov set out joyously, entirely unconcerned about the consequences, as though convinced that the living go on dying and the dead are forever dead. How passionately he wanted to live as long as he could enjoy life!
chapter xxvii
"Ich Sterbe"
Chekhov told a friend that he found every subject interesting except sickness, and he seemed determined now not to allow it to prevent him from participating in staging the first performance of The Cherry Orchard. From some mysterious inner resources he summoned reserves of strength to carry him through this last adventure in the theater which he had both loved and hated throughout his life. A good part of the first six weeks after his arrival in Moscow on December 4, 1903, he spent at the Art Theater, attending rehearsals of his play in the daytime and in seeing performances of other plays in the evenings.
What the censor might do to The Cherry Orchard had worried Chekhov, but the play was quickly certified with the deletion of only two brief passages — in Act II from the remarks of that "eternal student" Trofimov, where he speaks of most Russians living like savages in filth and stuffiness, and where he tells Anya that the old bark on the cherry trees seems to be tormented by painful visions of what happened years ago. Indeed, Chekhov had more reason to be concerned with what Stanislavsky would do to his play. "It is not blooming now," Stanislavsky wrote of the rehearsals of The Cherry Orchard to
10 Chekhov's favorite public baths in Moscow.
an actress friend on December 26. "The blossoms had only just begun to appear when the author arrived and messed up everything for us. The blossoms vanished and only now are new buds starting to show themselves."
Chekhov admired Stanislavsky's extraordinary inventiveness in his mise-en-scenes, but he also deplored his naturalistic excesses in these respects> especially in the use of sounds. He mimicked a character in The Cherry Orchard, speaking loud enough for the director to overhear: "What fine quiet. How wonderful! We hear no birds, no.dogs, no cuckoos, no owls, no clocks, no sleigh bells, no crickets." Though Stanislavsky described Chekhov as growing pale when he suggested that the whole end of the second act be shortened, he did not hesitate to revise it, for he had been dissatisfied with it all along.1