I understand nothing about it. There are guesses that she refused, at least at this time. She is an unusual girl who sincerely docs not wish to marry."
There is something almost gratuitous about Chekhov's assumption of his sister's rejection of any personal life of her own at the age of twenty-nine. The bond between brother and sister was mysteriously close and her sense of dedication to him was absolute. She never did marry. To what extent Masha's love for Chekhov was an inhibiting factor in her search for the happiness that marriage brings to a woman is difficult to say with certainty. Her love must have been very great, if we may judge from a curious outburst in one of Alexander's letters to his brother (about June 15, 1893) after a visit to Melikhovo: "Of one thing I'm convinccd. Your relations with Sister are false. A single tender word from you with a cordial note in it — and she is all yours. She is afraid of you and she sees in you only what is most praiseworthy and noble."
Whether this unusual devotion between brother and sister played a part in Chekhov's determination to remain single is equally hard to ascertain. Masha seemed confident that he would never marry. In the same letter to Suvorin in which he so emphatically told of her rejection of marriage, Chekhov immediately and equally emphatically added what could almost be construed as confirmation of a pact between them: "Now about myself. I don't want to marry, nor is there the woman. But the deucc with that. It would bore me to fuss about with a wife. However, it would not be a bad idea to fall in love. Without real love, life is dull." Intimate friends, and especially his brother Alexander, were concerned. "You live like an archimandrite," Alexander wrote him. "The golden moments pass and leave no trace, and all that will be left for you will be to go to the Zoological Garden and converse with your mongoose about the joys of bachclordom."
Certainly Chekhov did not find real love with Lidiya Avilova. After their second meeting in January 1892, he wrote her only four letters in the course of that year. These were all answers to ones from her, and, save for one already noted in the previous chapter, they are concerned largely with advice on her literary career and with criticism of her talcs, in which he quite forgetfully repeats his stricture that she must remain cold and not interject her own sympathies when she is depicting sad and unhappy people. In 1893 he wr°te her only once, as far as we know, and again in answer to a letter of hers. This letter, however, has an interesting bearing on the fourth chapter of her memoirs. She tells there of a third meeting with Chekhov, although she strangely enough does not date it, as she had done precisely in the case of the first two meetings. It is assumed by some Chekhov scholars that this meeting could have taken place only during Chekhov's long visits to Petersburg at the end of 1892 and the beginning of 1893.2 Lidiya now introduces an aura of mystery into her account. She claims that she received Chekhov's letters in secret, at the post office, poste restante, although she tells her husband of the correspondence, and she clearly implies that her sister, Nadezhda Alekseevna, wife of Khudekov, editor of the Petersburg Gazette, has entered into a little conspiracy all her own to bring Lidiya and Chekhov together. The sister sees to it, according to Lidiya's story, that the pair meet in her house, but Lidiya insists that she informed her husband in advance of the meeting. The rest of this chapter is mostly Lidiya's report of her conversation with Chekhov. He begins by asking about her children and expresses the opinion that it is fine to have one's own family.
" 'You ought to marry,' " she said.
" 'I ought to get married,'" she quotes him as replying. " 'But I am still not free. Though I'm not married, yet I have a family: a mother, sister, a younger brother. I have obligations.' "
Then he asks her if she is happy. In response she explains that she loves her family, but that she feels as though she is caught in a trap, that she is ceasing to exist because she cannot imagine harming her family in her desire for a better or happier life.
In answer to this obvious hint, Lidiya represents Chekhov as warmly urging her not to surrender her right to express her own personality, not to become reconciled to her present position and allow her family to dominate her existence. " 'If I had married,' Chekhov said thoughtfully, 'I would have proposed to my wife . . . imagine it. ... I would have proposed to her that we should not live together. In order that there should be none of those dressing gowns, nor that . . . Russian
2 In the invaluable work of N. I. Gitovich, Letopis zhizni i tvorchestva A. P. Chekhova (Chronicle of the Life and Works of A. P. Chekhov), Moscow, 1955, p. 334, she apparently assumes that this meeting took place at the beginning of January, 1893. The evidence set forth here is that this assumption is erroneous. Chekhov was also in Petersburg between October 31 and November 6, 1892, where he had been summoned because of Suvorin's illness. Again, there is no evidence that he saw Lidiya Avilova during this brief visit, when all his time appears to have been devoted to treating Suvorin and to seeing a few friends.
dissoluteness . . . and that shocking unceremoniousness.'" This is something that Chekhov might have had a character in one of his stories declare.
At that promising point Lidiya is summoned home because of a sick child. It appears, however, that this was just a ruse of her jealous husband. She concludes this chapter of her memoirs by declaring: " 'But I knew now. For the first time, without any doubt, definitely, clearly, I knew that I was in love with Anton Pavlovich.' "
In the extremely rich documentary material on Chekhov's life, there is no record of such a meeting. And his only extant letter to her in 1893 (March 1) makes it clear that he did not sec her during his stay in Petersburg at the beginning of that year, almost the only logical time when such a meeting could have taken place. Further, the contents of the letter once again fail to suggest any serious feeling on Chekhov's part for Lidiya Avilova. The letter obviously is an answer to one from her in which she scolded him precisely for not making the effort to sec her at her sister's house when he was in Petersburg in January, for continuing to forget her name, and for not keeping his promise to write. "I will not try to justify myself," he replied, "because it is not in my power. . . . However, I will only say that the reason I didn't go to Nadezhda Alckseevna's was not because I feared to meet there my most wicked enemy,3 but simply because, to my shame, I'm a dissolute, undisciplined man. Twenty times I resolved to go to her on the date of her evening-at-home, and twenty times dinners, suppers, guests, and every kind of unexpected event destroyed my resolution." After this quite unromantic excuse, he tries to chccr her up by saying that he would have liked to see her at her sister's, that her stories are being praised, and — once again — that she should write more coldly. He concludcs with remarks that reveal perhaps Avilova's suspicion of the unreality of her futile pursuit as well as Chekhov's realization of the unhappy weakness in this woman. "You're foolish to call your letters 'psychopathic.' You've not yet arrived at the point of writing such letters. Wait, when you become a famous author and begin to publish fat novels in the Herald of Europe, then your turn will come: the mania of greatness will seize you and you will then look down on our brotherhood from the heights and will write in your letters such sentences as: 'Only the thought, the one thought that I serve the holy,
3 The "most wicked enemy" no doubt was a reference to Leikin, and in this context it is another example of Lidiya Avilova's overworked imagination.