"While affirming nothing, I leave it to those who read this to decide themselves whether Anton Pavlovich was dry and cold — whether there was really no love in his life."
Lidiya Avilova's memoirs contain important biographical material about Chekhov. When the writer Ivan Bunin, who got to know Chekhov well in the last few years of his life, read the published memoirs, though not a complete version, he said that the contents came as a revelation to him. And without making any close study of all the facts in the case, he categorically accepted Avilova's contention that she was the great love of Chekhov's life.13 Bunin even implies that this was one of the reasons why Chekhov had no room left in his heart for Lika Mizinova.14 Bunin was acquainted with Avilova, and they corresponded when both were living abroad. So significant a part did he attribute to her in Chekhov's life that he reproduced most of her memoirs in his last work on Chekhov, as well as her letters to himself and his wife. Yet it is a curious fact that though he and Lidiya Avilova were devoted admirers of the dead Chekhov, not one word about him appears in these letters.15
What was fact and what may have been fiction in Lidiya Avilova's assertion that Chekhov was in love with her may best be considered in terms of the events as they chronologically occur in her memoirs. It should be said, however, that A. P. Chekhov in My Life is written with the flair of an able author who had had the benefit of Chekhov's criticism in achieving a literary career for herself. Indeed, it seems at times that an element of fiction encroaches upon the rigid prescription of veracity in memoir writing. So thought the editor of the volume in which her memoirs appear, for he declares: "Avilova, as it were, writes a novella about herself in the course of commenting on her quite extensive correspondence with Chekhov. ... In all of this it is impossible not to note the author's immoderate subjectivity and one-sidedness in her treatment of the material connected with Chekhov."16
Chekhov made no effort to see Lidiya Avilova again during the remainder of his stay in Petersburg at the beginning of 1892. In fact, he had already become involved with "the Ukrainian queen," as he dubbed her: the lovely actress Mariya Zankovetskaya, whom he had met at the Suvorins'. He drank champagne with her till four in the morning, took
See I. A. Bunin, О Chekhove (Concerning Chekhov), New York, 1955.
Compare with the above, pp. 66-67.
See Bunin (note 13), pp. 134-206.
10 A. K. Kotov's "Predislovie," in A. P. Chekhov v vospominaniyakh sovremen- nikov ("Foreword," in A. P. Chekhov in the Remembrances of Contemporaries), Moscow, i960, p. 15.
her tobogganing two days later, swore he would write a play for her to star in, and almost allowed her to persuade him to buy a farm near hers in the Chernigov Province.
But what of the hungry peasants? Chekhov had obtained almost no money in Petersburg. He returned to Moscow on January 11, made an unsuccessful effort to find his "Ukrainian Queen" at home, and three days later left for Nizhny Novgorod to see Yegorov and talk about aiding the famine-stricken. After discussions with Yegorov and dinner with the governor, he traveled around the villages in the bitter cold and almost lost his way in a fierce snowstorm. The situation struck him as very bad, and he observed that local officials in no sense obstructed private initiative. But, he complained, private philanthropy had done almost nothing for these vigorous Novgorodian peasants whom he admired. Petersburg donors, he sarcastically commented, expected 1800 pounds of sugar to take care of the needs of 20,000 people, on the principle of the Biblical miracle of feeding 5000 with five loaves. "There wouldn't be any famine in Nizhny Novgorod," he wrote Suvorin, "if people in Moscow and Petersburg did as much about the famine as they talk about it." (January 22,1892.)
After a week of hard work a severe cold, accompanied by sharp pains in the back, forced Chekhov to return to Moscow. He continued to raise funds for Yegorov, but as soon as he recovered from his illness, he set out, on February 2, with Suvorin to help in relief work in Voronezh, an expedition they had agreed upon when Chekhov was in Petersburg. Various factors contrived to turn this effort into a very unsatisfactory performance from Chekhov's point of view. For one thing, Suvorin played the combined role of a kind of government inspector and a wealthy entrepreneur bent upon offering worldly wisdom rather than practical endeavor. This approach involved them in various ceremonial dinners with the governor of Voronezh, other officials, and local celebrities, a degree of sociability entirely irksome to Chekhov. He was even asked to be present at the rehearsals of an amateur'performance of his play The Wedding for the benefit of the famine-stricken. To be sure, relief was much better organized there than in Nizhny Novgorod and at most they had business to do with food kitchens in only two villages. "In anything that concerns food kitchens and so forth," he wrote his sister, "we indulge in nonsense and are as naive as youngsters — of eourse, these remarks refer not to me but to that bronze statue that stands on the table in my study" — a reference to Suvorin. (February 9, 1892.) At the end of ten days of what he regarded as rather wasted activity, Chekhov returned to Moscow. In his sincere but not very effective attempts to aid in the famine, he must have secretly envied the practical idealism, the commanding national authority, and the tremendous capacity to get things done that made for the huge success of another writer engaged in famine relief —Leo Tolstoy.
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Ever since his first visit to the idyllic country seat of the Kiselevs at Babkino, Chekhov had dreamed of possessing such an estate. He had not exactly become status-minded, for he never forgot his lowly origin and he could discover virtues in it as well as deplore the deprivations it had thrust upon him. Much success had come to him early, and success is a stairway constantly inviting one to mount higher. Though he had no illusions about taking a place among the Turgenevs and Tolstoys, fortunate inheritors of landed wealth, his sampling of this form of country life had served to increase his desire to possess it permanently.
There were also practical reasons why Chekhov indulged in this dream. Of late, he had curiously become uncertain about his future as a writer. Where was it all leading to? At times, he even felt vaguely torn between medicine and literature and chafed over the conviction that he lacked the ideal conditions to profess either of them successfully. "Ah, my friends, how bored I am!" he had exploded to the Su- vorins on October 19, 1891. "If I'm a doctor, I ought to have patients and a hospital; if I'm a literary man, then I ought to live among people instead of on Malaya Dmitrovka with a mongoose. I need a bit of social and political life, even though it be a small bit, but this life within four walls, without nature and people, without a country, without health or appetite — this is not life. . . ."
In fact, Chekhov's existence in Moscow had been growing increasingly distasteful to him. He rarely saw genuine literary people at his home, he declared, and city life, whether that of Moscow or Petersburg, had recently become his target for frequent satiric jibes or expressions of acute dislike.
However, the basis of the compulsion that drove Chekhov on to the realization of his dream was an intense weariness with the financial limitations that cabined and confined the pattern of life which he now wished to pursue. This meant continued dcpcndcnce, the last remaining element of slavery for a man whose goal in life was absolute freedom. To continue to live in the city with his constantly mounting expenses would force him into a ceaselcss struggle to make both ends meet. Now he felt the need of much free time, unencumbered by money worries, to think, to read, to plan, and to write lengthy pieces, even novels, that would not be dependent upon the exigencies of the market. Chekhov reasoned that if lie owned a place in the country he would be relieved of the city's high rents and living expenses and the extra costs of hiring a dacha every summer. The income from his books and plays, he estimated, would take care of the fixed expenses of himself and his family in the country, where it was much cheaper to live, thus enabling him to forgo "pot-boiler" writing and do what he wished with all this released time. And he optimistically calculated how he would spend it. Apart from reading and what writing he cared to do, he would practice medicine in the country for nine months of the year. The other three, the winter months, he would come to the city, preferably to Petersburg, to see his friends, enjoy the theater and music, and devote himself intensively to writing. From hints in his letters it is also clear that he believed his health would improve if he could live in the country.