On this occasion, Chekhov again asked her to send him her tales in manuscript, a gesture, as already pointed out, he often made to beginning authors. She did, and he replied in two letters of sharp criticism, good advice, and qualified praise of her ability. There is nothing in the letters to differentiate them from similar ones which Chekhov wrote to budding authors. In her memoirs, however, she quotes from his third extant letter to her, erroneously representing it as "the beginning of my correspondence with Anton Pavlovich" — probably because it was the first to contain a personal note. It appears that her indignant husband had told her of a rumor which had come to his attention. After the party celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Petersburg Gazette, Chekhov and some of the other guests had gone to a restaurant — actually it was to Leikin's house. There, according to her husband, who apparently had heard the story from Leikin, Chekhov had got drunk and boasted to the enthusiastic guests that he would take Lidiya from her husband, make her get a divorce, and marry her. Though she, and ultimately her husband, became convinced that the story had been made up out of whole cloth by Leikin, she alluded to it in a letter to Chekhov. In quoting his answer in her memoirs, she judiciously omits a large section of criticism of one of her tales, and even in the personal part she deletes sentences, without the usual indication of dots, that either reflect on her ju Jgment or do not contribute to the picture of his deep but restrained love for her which she is intent on presenting in A. P. Chekhov in My Life. In the relevant part of the letter, with Avilova's omissions indicated by brackets, Chekhov actually wrote: "Your letter distressed and bewildered me. [You write about certain 'strange things' which I'm supposed to have said at Leikin's, then you beg me in the name of esteem for women not to speak of you 'in that spirit,' and finally you even say 'for having been truthful just this once I can find my name dragged into the mud.'] What is the meaning of this dreaming of yours? [Mud and me.] My self-esteem will not permit me to justify myself; further, your accusations are too unclear to allow me to decide on what grounds I can defend myself. As far as I can determine, it is a question of gossip. Isn't it so? I earnestly implore you (if you trust me no less than the gossipers), don't believe all the nasty things people say in your Petersburg. Or, if you find it impossible not to believe, then [don't] accept them wholesale but with reservations: either concerning my marriage to someone with [five] million and affairs with the wives of my best friends, etc. For God's sake, calm yourself. [If I don't sound convincing enough, have a talk with Yasinsky, who was with me at Leikin's after the anniversary. I recall that both of us, he and I, talked at some length of what fine people you and your sister are. We were both somewhat high after the jubilee, but if I had been as drunk as a cobbler, or had lost my mind, I would not have lowered myself to 'that spirit' and 'mud' (didn't your arm wither over that little word!), for I would be restrained by my usual decency and devotion as to my mother, sister, and to women in general. To speak badly about you, and in Leikin's presence!] However, God be with you. To defend myself from gossip is like begging a loan from a Jew;5 it is useless. Think as you wish about me." (March 19, 1892.)
5 The word "Jew" is omitted in the text of the Soviet edition of Chekhov's letters.
This fuller quotation from Chekhov's letter places the incident in its proper perspective. It docs not rcflcct well on the wisdom of the way that Lidiya Avilova took to reveal her dawning love to Chekhov, nor docs it suggest that his feeling for her ran any deeper than that which he exhibited to various other feminine correspondents.
It is difficult to ascertain precisely when Avilova, who died in 1943, wrote A. P. Chekhov in My Life, which first appeared, in 1947, in a volume of reminiscences about Chekhov by various figures.[1] Since a small scction of her work was published in a Soviet periodical as early as 1940,7 it may be assumed that the whole manuscript was prepared about this time, that is, some fifty years after the earliest events described. Since she appears to have kept no diary at the time, she had to depend entirely on her memory, after a lapse of many years, in reproducing the substantial amount of dialogue between herself and Chekhov. When Chekhov's sister planned an edition of his letters, Avilova surrendered only copies of his letters to her; the originals were subsequently stolen and have never been rccovercd. However, she apparently did not turn over copies of all his letters. One is definitely known to have been retained by her, and two others, contradicting some of the facts of her memoirs, she asked Chekhov's sister not to publish.[2] When she wrote her memoirs, she no doubt depended upon the six-volume edition of Chekhov's letters, edited by his sister, which appeared from 1912-1916. Her own letters to Chekhov she demanded back after his death, and these also have disappeared — which makes it impossible to verify certain of the data in her memoirs.®
To complicate the situation, a recent Soviet publication now makes it clear that the editor of Avilova's memoirs took liberties with the language of the manuscript and even omitted some of the material.[3]
In her Foreword to A. P. Chekhov in My Life, which was never printed with the original work and has only lately turned up in the Chekhov archives in Moscow,[4] Avilova explains why, in her old age, she decided to write her recollections of Chekhov. "This is a love affair," she declares, "which no one has ever known, although it consumed a whole ten years. It was 'our love affair.' . . . Not one word is invented in my romance. I have written much about myself, my thoughts and feelings. ...
"All the time I was writing I worried about being carried away by my fantasy, dreams, suppositions, guesses, and thus altering the truth. But I could not permit a single inaccuracy in my recollections of him, so sacred in Anton Pavlovich's memory to me. Because of this fear, I'm afraid that my romance resembles the minutes of a meeting.
"It distresses me that Chekhov, the hero of my account, rarely speaks. Hence it may seem that I did not value in him the great man that he was, and that I have referred to him as to any other person with whom I might have been in love.
"However, this is not so. Anton Pavlovich had an enormous influence on me, although I never took down his words. It was impossible to do this. He did not like to talk and spoke little. Somehow his attitude to life and people did not come out in conversation, for he often conveyed his thoughts in a few words or even by the expression on his face. . . .12
"In short, I have written about my romance as well as I could, as it in fact happened, and as it has remained in my memory. It has been my lot to hear investigators of his life say: 'How amazing! No women, no love . . .'
"They have concluded: 'He was cold, dry, hard. He could not love.'
"And they will probably write this in biographies of him. It is possible that my romance will help to close this gap and will appear to be significant and interesting despite the lack of clever conversation.