Although the weather was quite good at Yalta and his health rather tolerable, at least during the early part of his stay, Chekhov rarely went into town. One venture was to see P. N. Orlenev in Ibsen's Ghosts, which Chekhov described to Olga as "a rotten play and the acting not up to much. . . ." This amiable, wandering actor, whose talent and tales of the road so fascinated Chekhov — he advised the Art Theater to engage him — had turned up in the middle of March. He had sworn off liquor and offered to pay back a loan of a hundred roubles — one of the few loans that Chekhov ever recovered. When Orlenev declared his intention soon of taking his troupe abroad, much to his surprise Chekhov offered to write a play for him, a fact that he confirmed in a letter to his sister. Orlenev thought he was joking, but Chekhov insisted that it would be very easy to write a three-act play for performance abroad, without the worry of censorship, and apparently he intended to base it 011 Orlenev's life. He assured the actor that the work would be ready for him in September when he left for Europe, one of a number of Chekhov's future plans which fate prevented him from realizing.
Much of the time Chekhov spent in his study working away at the heaps of manuscripts that Goltsev sent him. He did this work carefully, sometimes writing criticism directly to the contributors, but more often he returned the manuscripts to Russian Thought with his reports. Of the many stories he read, he found extremely few that were acceptable to him.
Though Chekhov had promised to write tales for a number of editors and informed Olga in several letters that he was making progress, probably 011 the unfinished stories The Letter and Decompensation, nearly always he ended with the usual excuse that the parade of visitors prevented him from working. He told Garin-Mikhailovsky at this time that he had just finished copying in ink ten years of jottings in his notebook which concerned literary themes because the original penciled entries had begun to fade. "There are five hundred printed signatures of unused material here," he declared. "Enough for five years of work. If I'm able to write it all, the family will remain secure."
Ironically enough, only now, when the possibility of sustained creative work had ended, did Chekhov begin to receive the kind of fee which would long since have provided adequate security for him and his family if he had been paid at this rate since he had first achieved fame. For in February Marx, apparently worried by information of the national protest in the making over his profitable contract, at the time of Chekhov's jubilee, paid him a thousand roubles for the reprint rights of the short story, The Betrothed — four times the contract rate and actually seven hundred roubles more than Chekhov had received for its original publication. And less than a month later Marx gave Chekhov the handsome sum of twenty-five hundred roubles for the reprint rights to The Cherry Orchard.
Chekhov used the excuse with Olga that the war also hindered his writing. He kept fancying, he said, that because of the fighting no one would read what he wrote. Actually, as Altschuler pointed out, he was much agitated by the war, followed it closely in the press, and shared the national gloom over every Russian defeat. And when Olga's uncles, Sasha and Karl, went to the front, he anxiously followed their fortunes, wrote letters to his favorite Uncle Sasha, and sent him tobacco. By way of comforting his literary disciple Lazarevsky, who was with the forces in the Far East, he drew an alluring picture of the area from memories of his Sakhalin journey. In this letter of a restless dying man to a homesick soldier breathes an acute nostalgia for remembered beauties which he yearned to see again.
In fact, visitors at this time found Chekhov quite willing to drop any work at hand and talk about his future plans and about the many themes for stories that were fermenting in his mind. Or, as Altschuler noted, he would complain of feeling very weary and of needing a complete rest. Sometimes a caller would discover him sitting in his large armchair in the study without a manuscript, newspaper or book in his hands, just staring into space.
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When Chekhov left Moscow for Yalta in the middle of February, he had already decided upon a schedule for the following months. He intended to remain in Yalta during Olga's tour with the Art Theater in Petersburg and rejoin her in Moscow about May 1 when she returned. By then, or shortly thereafter, he hoped that the bothersome question of renting or buying a house near Moscow would be settled. During the summer, however, he expected to take the tour which he and Olga had been promising themselves for some time — either to a remote section of Russia or, preferably, abroad. Then, when Olga resumed her theatrical duties at the end of August, he would probably remain at Yalta in the autumn months and return to their newly acquired house to spend the whole winter near Moscow.
This definite schedule, however, and his rather full days at Yalta again did nothing to assuage his chronic impatience with life there, and he had to restrain himself from taking off for Moscow earlier than he anticipated. At one trying point he even contemplated a dash to Olga at Petersburg. He had hardly been in Yalta a week when he wrote his wife: "Life is dull and uninteresting; the people around here are vexatiously uninteresting, they have no interest in anything and are indifferent to everything." (February 27, 1904.)
This kind of harsh judgment, patently an offhand generalization because of some boring, long-staying local visitor, had by now become symptomatic of Chekhov's rebellion against the destiny allotted him. Olga tried to cheer him up in her letters. In one she wrote that she and Masha had found a fine new apartment on Leontievsky Lane which had an elevator — they were determined to end the misery of his climbing stairs. This pleased him, but he grumbled that elevators always seemed to break down when he wanted to use them. When she casually mentioned in a postcard that she had been ill with bronchitis, he flared up: How dreadful and stupid! Why had she not telegraphed? She spent money on telegrams to her relatives, so why did she begrudge spending it on him? And rather unfairly he then blamed his wife for not telling her sister-in-law, as he had urged, to bring her sick child to Yalta for treatment. He was convinced, he declared, that Olga had a low opinion of him as a doctor and that her sister-in-law eschewed Yalta because she did not wish to be near relatives, none of which was true.
One of the major causes of friction in their correspondence during this period was the old problem of finding a house. He now strongly favored the place they had seen together at Tsaritsyno, although he felt the price too high, and he kept pressing his wife to check up on various details and to see if she could not get the cost lowered. Olga did not particularly favor this location, partly because she had heard that there was much fever in the area. And later she was quite offended when he made the mistake of asking her to take Masha's advice on the matter. In her annoyance Olga skipped a couple of days in her letters to him and he exploded: "You rail against Tsaritsyno, that is, you write about fever there, but I still stick up for Tsaritsyno. If the owner of the house affiirms that there is no fever in her district, then we must believe her. ... I write this not knowing where you are, how you are, or what I'm to think of your silence. . . . Why, oh why have you not once telegraphed me about your health? WTiy? Obviously for you I count for nothing, I am simply superfluous. In short, it is beastly." And then, as though to frighten her, although he had several times made the same statement to others, he declared: "If at the end of June or in July I'm feeling well, I shall go to the front; I'll ask your permission. I'll go as a doctor." (March 12,1904.)