There was perhaps more evasion than understanding in his reply, which he apparently scribbled off with the ease of one of the many prescriptions he used to write for the common cold: "Forgive me. I'm frozen, for I've just returned from Tsaritsyno . . . my hands can
5 This letter, dated February 9, 1904, is not quoted in Lidiya Avilova's memoirs. It is one of three of her letters to Chekhov which by chance survived in his archives, and it was recently published, in part, in A. P. Chekhov v vospominaniyakh sovremennikov (A. P. Chekhov in the Remembrances of Contemporaries), 4th ed., Moscow, i960, p. 726.
hardly write and I must pack. All the best to you, keep cheerful, take a less complicated view of life, for it is probably much simpler in reality. And whether life, of which we know nothing, deserves all the tormenting thoughts on which our Russian minds wear themselves out — this is still a question." And it remained one, for this was the last she heard from Chekhov.
«3»
Chekhov's birthday and jubilee presents arrived at Yalta shortly after he did, and they were unpacked and many were put on display in the study. Some were costly antiques, such as ancient chests, fabrics, and an eighteenth-century silver inkstand and pen. An artist friend had presented him with an exquisite, hand-carved miniature of an old Russian village. Stanislavsky had searched long for a mediaeval gift of richly embroidered cloth which he used to decorate the jubilee wreath. Chekhov had mercilessly commented that it ought to be in a museum, and when the hurt director asked what they should have given him, he replied, with pretended seriousness, a mousetrap, for mice had to be destroyed, or socks, for if his big toe stuck out of his right sock his wife would suggest that he wear it on his left foot. Actually, he declared to Stanislavsky, he regarded the fishing poles of his artist friend Korovin as his most beautiful present. As he displayed the gifts to Altschuler, he comically complained that someone had spread a rumor that he was a lover of antiques when in reality he could not abide them. The physician particularly admired the old silver inkstand. Chekhov remarked: "Well, we don't blot with sand nowadays but with blotting paper, and goose quills have also gone out." Then he added with his charming smile: "However, if you like the inkstand, I'll order that it be turned over to you as a punishment after my death." Little did Altschuler realize then that in a very short time the inkstand would be delivered to him, for he thought that Chekhov looked uncommonly well upon his return from Moscow.
Chekhov was surprised and a little apprehensive to find his vacationing brother Alexander, his wife, one son, a servant and a dog all en- sconccd in a cottagc near him when he arrived at Yalta. They remained for over a month, and Chekhov was soon writing to Olga and Masha that his brother was leading a sober life, was kind and interesting, and in his conduct altogether a comfort to him. There was some hope, he explained to Olga, that Alexander would not take to drink again, although his case, he reminded her, was somewhat like that of her Uncle Sasha's, another extremely amiable and talented alcoholic. After Alexander's departure, the brothers resumed for a short time their amusing correspondence. Alexander agreed, on Chekhov's urging, to visit Olga and see her act, and he promised, exercising the rights of a firstborn, to pass stern judgment on his younger brother's wife. "One must understand everything, Antosha!" he humorously admonished, while at the same time plagiarizing him. "Even that flies purify the air." And Chekhov retorted in his last words to the brother who, he once said, was too gifted in many things to be able to devote himself to any one thing: "Don't preen yourself on being the firstborn, for the principal thing is not to be the firstborn, but to have a mind." (April 19, 1904.)
Much encouraging information reached Chekhov about the great success of The Cherry Orchard in provincial towns where performances were frequent, often unauthorized, and on the basis of dubious copies of the play, for the corrected version had not yet appeared in print. If only some of the actors in Moscow had been better, he lamented to Olga in conveying this good news. In March her brother and his wife reported to him that they had seen a Moscow performance and they said that Stanislavsky had done abominably in the last act and had dragged it out interminably. "How awful this is!" he wrote Olga. "An act that ought to take no more than twelve minutes lasts forty with you people. I can say one thing: Stanislavsky has ruined my play. But there, bless the man." (March 29,1904.)
Chekhov's enthusiasm for provincial actors, however, was somewhat dampened when in April a Sevastopol group staged The Cherry Orchard in Yalta. Posters all over the town advertised that the performance would follow the mise-en-scene of the Art Theater, under the supervision of the author, ^ese vile actors had murdered his play, he told Olga. The telephone kept ringing, friends kept sighing, while he, a sick man, so to speak, there for the good of his health, was bound to dream of how to escape — a subject fit for a comic article, he said. His Petersburg acquaintance E. P. Karpov, now a director of Suvorin's theater and a "dramatist of no talent but of boundlessly grandiose pretensions," as Chekhov described him, saw the Yalta performance and callcd on him to discuss it. He reported Chekhov's comments, which were directed toward a criticism of the pattern the Art Theater had already established for staging his play. "Is this really my Cherry Orchard? Are these my types? With the exception of two or three roles, none of this is mine.
I describe life. It is a dull, philistine life. But it is not a tedious, whimpering life. First they turn me into a weeper and then into a simply boring writer. However, I've written several volumes of merry talcs. But criticism has tricked me out in the guise of some kind of mourner or other."
Chekhov's faith in the Art Theater was revived by Stanislavsky's telegram on the occasion of the Petersburg opening of his play cm April 2, that "the success of The Cherry Orchard with the audience was very great, incomparably greater than in Moscow," a judgment confirmed by the telegram of Nemirovich-Danchenko, who declared that never in all his long experience with the theater had he observed an audience that reacted so positively to every slightest nuance of a psychological drama. Chekhov had long ago committed himself to this remarkable theater which had revolutionized the whole course of theatrical developments in Russia. And whatever may have been his quarrels with its directors over the interpretation of his plays, his final conviction, as he expressed it to his wire in urging her not to worry over stupid Petersburg reviews, was: ". . . No one can tear you to pieces, do what they will. For as artists you have already accomplished what you set out to do and you can regard the present and the future almost dispassionately." (March 31,1904.)