Such pleasures, however, were few that summer and the prolonged agony of attending Nikolai at times filled Chekhov with an almost irrational urge to escape, to go anywhere rather than remain at the dacha. He dreamed constantly of Odessa, the Caucasus, Paris; he studied French and German; and at moments he seemed guilty of wishing for his brother's death so that he could get away to Europe. "I would be happy to scamper off to Paris," he wrote Tikhonov, "and from the top of the Eiffel Tower survey the world, but — alas! — I'm bound hand and foot and do not have the right to move a step from here." (May 31, 1889.) And, learning that Suvorin planned to go abroad, Chekhov pathetically wrote him at the beginning of May: "What pleasure it would give me to go to Biarritz, where there is music and lots of women! If it were not for the artist I would really go with you. I'd find the money." In fact, most of his closely guarded savings had already vanished. He replied to Alexander, who was much concerned over Nikolai's illness and offered any help he could give: "The very best help would be money. If there had been no money, Nikolai would now be in a charity hospital. Consequently, the chief thing is money. Even five to ten roubles would not go amiss." (May 8, 1889.)
It was this overwhelming need to breathe air other than that of the sickroom which led Chekhov, in the middle of June, after some ten weeks of ceaseless care of Nikolai, to encourage Alexander to come and take his place for a few days while he went to Poltava Province to visit his friends the Smagins, where he had had such a pleasant time the year before. He left with Svobodin and several members of the Lintvarev family. On the way a cold wind blew up and it began to rain, which Chekhov regarded as a punishment for his having deserted Nikolai. They arrived at the village of the Smagins at night, wet and chilled, and got into cold beds. The next morning, June 17, the foul weather continued. Chekhov commented later that he would never forget the gray skies, muddy roads, and the tears on the trees. That morning a peasant from the town brought him a soggy telegram: kolya is dead. He at once went by horse to the nearest railway station. The return trip became a nightmare of delays — he had to wait hours for connections. In one town he wandered about the streets, then sat by a wall in the public park, feeling cold and terribly depressed. Behind the wall he could hear the voices of actors rehearsing a melodrama. Finally he arrived at Luka to enter a house in deep mourning. Nikolai had passed away in Alexander's arms, the first of his family to die.
Chekhov wrote M. M. Dyukovsky, one of his brother's closest friends, that Nikolai had been buried in the Ukrainian manner. The brothers and friends carried the coffin into the church to the accompaniment of tolling bells. Then, after the service, they bore it to the village cemetery, remote and peaceful, where birds sang constantly and the grass smelled sweet. Shortly after the funeral, a cross was erected which could be seen from the distant fields. "If there were any faults in his past," Chekhov sadly concluded, "he has expiated them by his sufferings." (June 24, 1889.)
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After writing Suvorin that there was not a kopeck's worth of poetry left in life, that all his desires were dormant, "In short, to hell with everything," Chekhov cleared out of his dacha on July 2. It bothered his conscience to leave the family behind in the same unhappy mood, but after the trying experiences of the past months and the death of Nikolai, he could not stand the sight of the house any longer. Where he went seemed of no consequence. He thought of joining Suvorin, then in Vienna, but then a telegram from Lensky inviting him to Odessa, where he and the actors of the Maly Theater were on tour, settled the issue. He would leave for abroad from Odessa.
The noisy, carefree actors and actresses of the Maly Theater were an antidote for any depressed state of mind, and besides they were extremely fond of Chekhov. For ten days he basked in their jolly company, staying with them at the Northern Hotel, where they were quartered. In the morning he went for a swim with one of them, then for coffee in a cafe by the famous stone steps of Odessa. At noon he would accompany the actress Glafira Panova on a shopping tour and have ice cream with her at sixty kopecks a portion — it was so hot, Chekhov complained, that he spent almost half of the small sum he had gathered for this trip on ice cream.
The well-known dramatic actress Cleopatra Karatygina was rather shocked when Chekhov was first introduced to her at a fashionable bathing pavilion. For he strolled up, elegantly dressed in a gray suit and soft hat, eating sunflower seeds out of a large paper bag like any peasant. But they became fast friends and he inscribed two of his books to her and his photograph. She recalls how he and his constant Odessa companion, his old Taganrog schoolmate Sergeenko, appeared once at her room for tea, Sergeenko shouldering like a rifle a long loaf of French bread. Chekhov regularly attended the theater, where he saw performances of such plays as Hamlet and Don Juan, and was sometimes called backstage to treat a coughing actress. After supper and drinks, all the company would gather at Cleopatra Karatygina's room for tea, a visit which lasted until two in the morning in a babble of conversation about the theater and actresses and actors. He might then accompany the dark-eyed Glafira to her room and on the way to his own be cornered by the fat actor Grekhov, and they would go off to a cafe to drink and talk till dawn.
This frivolous regimen was varied by excursions to the environs of Odessa. On one of these trips Sergeenko introduced Chekhov to a friend, I. N. Potapenko, a young Odessa journalist and writer. The admiring Potapenko, with whom Chekhov became very friendly several years later, acutely observed that as usual he was reticent on this first meeting, for he disliked lending himself to any of those who anticipated that he would say brilliant things. Chekhov did not like to stand out in a group.
Since he had failed to hear from Suvorin concerning his whereabouts at this time, Chekhov abandoned his intention of going abroad. On the other hand, he had already grown weary of feminine company, he remarked, and of listening to the gossip of these actresses whose jealousy of each other, in which the assignment of roles played a major part, irritated him. Though his money was running out, he rather indifferently decided to push on to Yalta, a place for which he had no particular affection. The Maly Theater company gave him a merry send-off to the boat and presented him with two neckties.
Life at Yalta, however, turned out to be varied and lively and no doubt helped to jolt Chekhov out of his depressed mood. In fact, his spirits improved so much that he again turned to writing — a long story for the Northern Herald. And soon he met several old friends and made new ones, went swimming frequently, and once almost lost his life in the water when a peasant narrowly missed his head with a heavy boathook.
One of the new friends he made and to whom he eventually became quite attached was young Elena Shavrova, one of three talented sisters of a Kharkov landowner. He saw a good deal of her at Yalta and cncouraged her literary efforts, correcting and sending one of her stories to New Times. Indeed, his fame seems to have preceded him at Yalta, for soon he was being pressed by a number of would-be authors to read their manuscripts. With one of these, A. Gurlyand, he discussed the theater and made the well-known observation, which he was to repeat later: "If in the first act you hang a pistol on the wall, then in the last act it must be shot off. Otherwise you do not hang it there." And Gurlyand also reports him as saying: "One ought not to be afraid of the farcical in a play, but moralizing in it is abominable."