After the excitement of attending rehearsals, the party and jubilee and the opening of his play, Chekhov seemed content to remain at home. Besides, real Moscow cold had set in. Occasionally he would venture out with Olga, on her free days, for he loved to walk along Petrovka or Kuznetsky Most, looking at the shops and crowds, pleased as a child with his new fur coat and beaver cap which she had finally had the furrier make for him. Later he was to thank her for being so nice and for the wonderful time they spent together during those winter months.
Indeed, because of his painful difficulty in managing the three flights to his apartment, only what Chekhov considered important events persuaded him to make the effort, such as attending the opera benefit performance at the Grand Theater of his friend Chaliapin or going to the funeral of Dr. N. V. Altukhov, a teacher and medical classmate.4 At the university church he joined in the singing with his deep voice, and
4 The burial of Dr. Altukhov took place on December 17, 1903.
there he met another classmate, Dr. Rossolimo. Before proceeding to the cemetery, Chekhov requested that they go to Rossolimo's house and rest a bit. There the hostess asked to take a picture. As they posed, Chekhov, in the spirit of the occasion, joked about which of them would be the first to follow their dead classmate to the grave. At the entrance to the cemetery youths bore the casket over the heads of the funeral procession, and others, with proud faccs, carried a huge wreath of fresh flowers, bearing the inscription: From His Students. Chekhov whispered to Rossolimo: "Here are those who bury the old and bring fresh flowers and the hopes of youth together with him into the kingdom of death."
Chekhov made another exception to attend a meeting of the Wednesday Club, an informal group of Moscow literary people got together by N. D. Teleshov and ordinarily gathering at his home to read and discuss works in progress. His sister and Olga accompanied him. The fare of the day was a rather heavy paper on the philosophy of Nietzsche read by Goltsev. Little debate followed on this subject and at the end some of the members, including a few of the foremost authors of the time, gathered around Chekhov. One young writer, S. T. Semenov, observed that his face was that of a sufferer, his chest seemed to have fallen in, and his clothes hung on him as on a peg. Yet he was kindly, smiling, sociable; and while they listened, often laughing, he talked amusingly about his early failures in literature. Yet all of them, related Semenov, felt that he was not long for this world and they grew thoughtfully sad after he left.
On the whole, however, Chekhov's health remained surprisingly good that winter, and he seemed to enjoy keeping himself busy correcting the proof of The Cherry Orchard and with his editorial work for Russian Thought. By preference he concentrated on the manuscripts of new authors, leaving those of established writers to the judgment of Goltsev. And hopefully he continued to promise talcs of his own to pleading publishers. But the usual visitors and the commissions he undertook for friends and strangers — not the least of which was trying vainly to have repaired the battered watch of the Yalta headmistress, and finally buying her a new one — ate into his time. As early in his stay as January 20, he wrote to Sredin: "There is such a terrible press of people here that I have not one free moment, for I'm constantly receiving or seeing visitors off, talking endlessly, so that in those rare times when I am free I begin to dream about returning to
my Yalta penates, and I must say that I dream of it with satisfaction."
One much discussed subject that greatly disturbed Chekhov at this time was the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war. Though he believed there was a lot of lying about the issues in the press, he expressed normal patriotic sentiments, was sure his countrymen would triumph, and even vaguely contemplated going to the front as a physician, in which post he was convinced he would learn more about the fighting than the journalists. But when someone approached him to write a patriotic play about the war, he objected, said Stanislavsky, and declared: "Listen, it is necessary that twenty years should pass. It is impossible to speak of it now. The soul must first be in repose. Only then can an author be unprejudiced." And when Lidiya Avilova, like some strange voice arising out of the depths of the national crisis, wrote to ask him to contribute a story for a volume she was preparing to aid Russian war victims, he firmly discouraged the project. There were some fifteen such collections in the making, he replied, and they wasted time and made little or no money. If she must persist, he advised an anthology of the best sayings on wounded soldiers, on compassion and aid for them, drawn from the world's foremost writers. That would be quick and easy to do, he said, and might even be interesting.
What turned Chekhov's thoughts toward hated Yalta again after he had been in Moscow less than two months? It would be hard to say. As we have seen, first he contemplated going abroad, but a lack of money seems to have prevented this. For some time now travel had become a habit, a way of life. After a short time in one place, he longed to leave it, even if it meant leaving his wife, and his reasons for leaving often seem like mere rationalizations.
Chekhov did not offer the reason of ill health for wishing now to leave Moscow, and "too many visitors" he knew from long experience would be a nuisance duplicated at Yalta. Further, he was once again disobeying the doctor's orders. Ostroumov's advice to live in or near Moscow through the winter months and to avoid trips abroad was possibly motivated, like Altschuler's advice, by the realization that travel only worsened Chekhov's condition. At best, the search up to this point for a house on the outskirts of the city, which was suitable and within his means, had been half hearted, although at first he had so enthusiastically accepted this prospect. Perhaps the knowledge that Olga would again be going to Petersburg on tour influenced his decision to leave, yet he left considerably before her departure.
As though to appease his conscience, he and Olga, on February 14, went to Tsaritsyno, about twenty miles from Moscow, to look at a house there for sale. He regarded it as a good possibility but he could come to no decision. Unable to get a train, they had to drive all the way back in an open sleigh in freezing weather. But according to Olga, he enjoyed watching the white fields sparkling in the sun and listening to the scrunch of the runners in the hard snow. Some years later, in recalling this episode, she wrote: "It was as though fate had been gracious and had resolved to bestow upon him during the last year of his life the joys he prized most: Moscow, winter, the production of The Cherry Orchard, and the people he loved."
However, that very day, shortly after he got back from Tsaritsyno, Chekhov prepared to desert these joys, and also Olga, for Yalta. Among the last-minute matters to attend to was an answer to another letter of Lidiya Avilova, who now seemed disposed to reopen their correspondence again with more of her emotional self-laceration. After agreeing in her letter on the unwisdom of publishing a volume of tales to aid Russian victims of the war with Japan, she suddenly plunged into a curiously cryptic apologia for the whole course of her behavior toward him. "I would very much like to see you," she wrote, "to speak to you in order to relieve my mind of much that is so hateful to me. It is all the more ludicrous and sad, especially at my age when life has passed, to carry on so painfully! Truly, it is shameful. In all conscience, however, I do not feel that I have deserved it. Forgive this unsolicited frankness, Anton Pavlovich. Although I did not seek it, I've seized this opportunity. I feared I would die without succeeding in saying that I have always profoundly esteemed you and regarded you as the best of men. And what of it if I have lowered myself in your opinion? So it had to be. It has been the greatest sorrow of my life. Now it is time to say it. ... I don't want you to forgive me, but I do want you to understand."6