the eternal, the immovable, has kept me from suicide!' However, I seem to be writing nonsense. Forgive me."
Indeed, this letter suggests that Chekhov had discerned the irrational passion of Lidiya Avilova and was trying with some gentleness to discourage her. However irrational or purely imaginary the account of her meeting with him in the fourth chapter in her memoirs may be, her pursuit of Chekhov continued.
His efforts to discourage Lika Mizinova, however, very likely sprang from a real fear of the strength of his feeling for her. If he had made a sacrifice of the beautiful Lika to his constant need for tenderness, the protracted period of disengagement brought her unhappiness and reflected no credit on Chekhov. As a close friend of the whole family, Lika was always a most welcome guest over the first two years at Melikhovo. But the frequency of her visits must be attributed in some part to urgent invitations he made to her in letter after letter. Nor did he fail to see her on most of his trips to Moscow, and he pressed her to come to Petersburg when he visited there — actually the time when it has been assumed that he might have been seeing Lidiya Avilova I In the summer of 1892 Chekhov and Lika appear to have planned a trip to the Caucasus together — which, however, did not materialize. His letters to her over this period invariably contained some such endearment or plea as: "Indeed, my angel, you have so turned my head that I'm ready to believe twice two equals five;" "My all to you ... do you understand? AH"; "I'm dull without you and would give five roubles for the possibility of talking with you even if that lasted only five minutes"; "I don't need to write, only to sit closc to you and talk"; "Write me, do you hear? I beg you on my knees"; "I await you and dream of your coming as a Bedouin in the desert dreams of water"; "Be sure to come. You know how I need you. Don't deceive me, Liku- sya, for heaven's sake, come!"
Such language and sentiments no doubt led Lika on, but the mixture of levity and seriousness in his letters, and perhaps in his conversation, confused and irritated her. He encouraged his "rivals" and then pretended jealousy of them. Or he would send her a letter he had addressed to Trofim, the imaginary lover he had invented: "Trofiml You son of a bitch. If you don't stop pursuing Lika, I'll shove a corkscrew into you, you cheap riffraff, in the place that rhymes with lass. Ah, you turd! Really, don't you know that Lika belongs to me and that we already have two children? You pig's snoutl You toadstool! Go out into the yard and refresh yourself in a mud puddle, for you've gone nuts, you son of a bitch! Feed your mother and respect her, but let the girls alone. You beast!!! Lika's Lover."4
The correspondence indicates that Lika's bafflement over this treatment led to frequent quarrels. In her letters she charged him with egoism, with always wanting his own way, and with doing things solely for his own satisfaction. And he accused her of distorting his words, with acting like a shrewish governess, and with worrying too much about being an old maid. Then, like lovers, they would write of the sweet joys of making up. "Ah, how I would like it (if I could) to tighten the lasso more firmly," she wrote after one of these reconciliations. For a long time Masha was convinced that her brother was very much in love with Lika.
Chekhov was obviously fully aware of Lika's love for him, but his efforts to counteract it were in conflict with a powerful inner desire not to break off relations with her. Apart from his serio-comic behavior and his occasional treatment of her as a naughty little girl, he tried to discourage Lika by harping upon the fact that he was growing old and was good for nothing. In a rare moment of self-examination that sheds some light on the confused feelings that allowed him to tamper with the affections of this charming girl, he wrote her in a serious vein from Melikhovo on March 27, 1892: "Lika, when will it be spring? Regard this question literally and do not seek in it any hidden meaning. Alas, I'm already an old young man, my love is not the sun and does not create spring either for me or for that bird which I love! Lika, I do not love you so ardently. I love in you my past sufferings and my lost youth." In short, it was already too late. Although he was only thirty- two, the golden period of youth when love bloomed in the spring had vanished.
Toward the end of her visits to Melikhovo in 1893, Lika had apparently come to the same conclusion — that Chekhov had no intention of marrying her or anybody else. She wrote him a frank letter: "You know quite well how I feel about you, and hence I'm not at all ashamed to write about it. I know also that your behavior toward me is condescending and indifferent. My strongest wish is to cure myself of the hopeless condition in which I am now, but it is very difficult to do it by
4 These expressions are drawn from Chekhov's letters to Lika Mizinova, dated April 22, August 13, and November 1892; also July 16, July 27-30, and December 19, 1893.
myself. I beg you to help me. Please don't ask me to come to see you, and don't try to see me. This may mean nothing to you, but it may help me to forget you. . . ."
Perhaps it was Lika's frustration over her love for Chekhov and the emotional disturbance it caused that led her to pay attention to Potapenko, whom she met at Melikhovo during the second half of 1893. With feminine instinct, she may have had the ancient device of jealousy in mind — a hopeless motif where Chekhov was concerned. Soon Lika and Potapenko were making the trip together from Moscow to Melikhovo. They had music in common, and Chekhov seemed deliberately to further their affinity in this respect by pleading with them to play and sing together on ever)' possible occasion. The fact that he had a wife and two children did not lessen Potapenko's zeal for philandering. On October 7, 1893, Lika wrote Chekhov a frightened letter, in which she pleaded: "I must, you understand, I must know whether you are coming [to Moscow] and when, or not at all. It is all the same, only I have to know. In fact, only two to three months remain to me in which to see you, and after that, perhaps, never." Apparently, this was a last effort on Lika's part before she submitted to Potapenko. Chekhov, however, had no resources to copc with such a situation. The springtime of youth had died; marriage had passed him by.
chapter xiii
"For the Lonely Man, the Desert Is Everywhere"
The cartload of medical supplies Chekhov had brought with him to Melikhovo was no idle gesture. His practice in Moscow had been dwindling, restricted to a few friends who regarded it as a free personal service. Such a situation was unsatisfactory in terms of both his professions — medicine and writing. For Chekhov made no secret of the fact that his medical practice, which in many respects was distasteful to him, opened a door to interesting literary situations and characters. His ideal image of the doctor was that of the scientist advancing the horizons of medicine. Perhaps, if he had had his way, he would have specialized in psychiatry, a new branch of medicine in Russia which had not been taught at Moscow University when he was a student there. In a conversation with Tatyana Shchepkina-Kupemik, he remarked: "If you want to become a real writer, study medicine. Especially psychiatry. It has helped me and saved me from errors." He made a serious effort to keep up on the latest medical literature. And since his Sakhalin study, social medicine, which was somewhat looked down upon by city practitioners but was advocated by progressive County Councils, had taken on a new importance in his eyes, particularly for country doctors. Chekhov had always connected owning an estate in the country with greater medical activity on his part. He thought of it as an enriching social and human experience, one that would enable him to know the peasantry better and would also provide him with fresh material for his literary labors.