Chekhov : scenes from a life

I have had to submit to various prvations because of it: I do not go outside after three o'clock in the afternoon, I do not drink at all or eat anything hot, I do not walk fast, and stick only to the streets, I am not living basically - I'm a vegetable. And it irritates me, I'm in low spirits, and it seems to me that the Russians at dinner just talk about trivialities and nonsense, and I ha/e to make an effort not to be rude to them.³⁸

Writing to his sister about his health two days later, he skilfully deflected discussion of what was really going on by giving her a French lesson:

Now about my health. Everything is fine. Je suis bien portant. In French healthy is 'sa^:n', but that only relates to food, water, climate; people say about themselves 'bien portant' from 'se porter bien' - to carry oneself well, to be healthy. When you greet people you say 'Je suis charme de vous voir Lien portant' -1 am delighted to see you looking well. . ,³⁹

It was not in Chekhov's nature to succumb to self-pity, and besides, Alexei Lyubimov, another doctor who he became friendly with in Nice, was suffering from pleurisy and Inflammation of the heart. 'As for my health,' he informed Suvorin before he was struck by another bout of blood-spitting, 'my illness is proceeding crescendo and is obviously already incurable: I'm talking about laziness. Apart from that I am as strong as an ox.' Yet in order not to tire himself going up two flights of stairs, Chekhov now moved down to the middle floor of the Pension Russe, which meant once again having to get used to a new desk. He also found it difficult adapting to the new regime which confined him to barracks in the middle of the afternoon. 'Because of the blood I am sitting at home as if I was under arrest, and here I am writing to you and wondering what else to say,' he wrote to Suvorin in December. 'I am bored and lonely on my own'. A few weeks later Dr Lyubimov died, and Chekhov joined the mourners at his funeral in the Russian ceme tery at Caucade on a hill five miles to the west of the city. Its views are now blighted by buildings and roads, but m 1898 it was a green and peaceful place with clean, sweet-smelling air. Chekhov loved it.⁴⁰ After the cemetery was founded in 1867, the bodies of Russians who had been buried in the English graveyard next door were transferred here, and a small Orthodox chapel erected.⁴¹

The pleasure that Chekhov took in being in the south of France palled when the symptoms of tuberculosis reappeared; he began feeling homesick for Russia and for proper winter weather. It rained continuously for three days at the end of November and he told his mother in a letter that he had bought a 'ight silk umbrella for six francs. It is tempting to think he might have made his purchase at the little umbrella shop in the Rue Colonna d'lstria in the old city. With a sign proudly proclaiming Maison fondee en 1850 above the door, and an interior that seems unchanged smce those times, it was a venerable institution even by the time Chekhov was living in Nice, and still sells elegantly patterned parasols alongside more practical parapluies. Perhaps Chekhov went back there to buy the umbrellas requested by his mother and sister as well. Rain made him yearn for snow and crisp Russian winter days, and he wondered f his frend Alexandra Khotyamtseva in Paris was also hanker ng for snow. After all, like laikas, you and I don't feel qu te normal without snow,' he wrote to her two days before the non-Russian reiidents of Nice celebrated Christmas.⁴²

Chekhov missed bis two laika puppies - he had had to leave them only weeks after they had arrived at Melikhovo, after all. Chekhov's father had w ltten in September to tell him that the puppies had grown and that the first snow had fallen, and shortly afterwards Masha wrote to say that they had dug up all the tulips she had planted, and so she wished her brother had taken them with h m to France.⁴³ Chekhov told her by return that the puppies needed disciplining, and asked his sister to take a photograph of them to send him, as people were always asking him what sort of aogs they were and were interested. He encountered all kinds of dogs when he went out for his walks every day, but toy breeds seemed to be more popular than Siberan hunting dogs in metropolitan Nice. They were usually m muzzles, he told his mother in a letter (describing to her one particular long-haired dachshund he had seen which he thought looked like a furry caterpillar), but even so they seemed very cultured to him somehow. 'Culture oozes out of every shop window, from every raffia basket,' he wrote to Suvorin's wife Anna; 'every dog smells of civilisation.'⁴⁴ Sadly, before Masha could produce a photograph of Nansen and Laika, both puppies died at the hands of malicious boys from the village. The dogs had endeared themselves to the Chekhov household by coming home promptly for lunch and dinner after running round outside all day and even Masha was saddened by having to report the protracted death of Nansen in early January. It had ru 'ned everybody's New Year festivities, she said. Then a few weeks later she had to write with the news that Laika too had fallen ill and died.⁴⁵

Watching all those dogs Deing taken out foi walks in Nice made Chekhov ponder a subject for a story which two years later would become 'The Lady with the Little Dog' He made the following entry in his notebook around this time: 'Animals are always trying to sniff out secrets {find the lair), and that's why human beings are doing battJe with their own ainmal instincts in respecting other people's secrets.'⁴⁶ In the story, this idea .s recognizable in Gurov's thoughts as he walks his daughter to school on his way to a reunion w'th his beloved Anna:

Ля be was talking, he was thinking about the fact that he was going to a rendezvous and that there was not one living soul who knew about it; probably no one ever would know about ^;t. He had two lives: one was the public one, which was visible to everybody who needed to know about it, but was full of condi tienal truth and cont ^:tiona' dece't, jst b'ke the lives of his friends and acquaintances, while the other one was secret. And by some stra.ige co^:n«.!dence, perhaps it was just chance, but everything that was mportant, interesting and essential to him, in wh'ch he was sincere and did not deceive himself, and which made up the hner core of b's life, was hidden from others, while everything that was false - the outer skin in which he hid in order to cover up the truth, like his work at the bank, for example, the arguments at the club, his 'lesser species', and going to receptions with his wife - all that was pub'ic. And he judged others to be like himself, not believing wnat he saw, and always supposing that each person's real and most interest) ig J'fe took place beneath a shroud of secrecy, as if under the vei* of night. Every individual existence is a mystery, ana it is maybe partly for this reason that cultured people take such pains for their secrets to be respected.

'The Lady with the Little Dog' is sel m Yalta, and was written in Yalta, but bearing in mind Chekhov's remark that he needed to write from memory, he may well also have been inspi red by the dozens of chic ladies walking their poodles up and down the Promenade des Anglais in Nice when he composed its famous opening: