Rehearsals for The Cherry Orchard began in November 1903. When Stanislavsky started thinking about the 'dog on a lead' which Charlotta Ivanovna the governess enters with in the first act, Olga's dog, a black dachshund called Schnap, immediately presented himself as the obvious candidate and was summoned for an audition. It was undoubtedly Chekhov who had suggested, during his visit to Moscow the previous summer, that Olga get a dog. If she had a dog, he reasoned that it could keep her company in his absence, and in due course it could be taken to Yalta. Schnap had been duly delivered to Olga's apartment while she was seeing Chekhov off on to his train back to Sevastopol,23 and she proudly announced to her husband that he was a pure pedigree. Masha was not so sure, and her doubts are borne out by the one extant photograph of Chekhov standing in his garden with Schnap and Sharik.
Olga Knipper as Ranevskaya in The Cherry Orchard, 1904
In his letters to Olga in Moscow, Chekhov wrote to say that he shook his paw, and worried that when he got to Yalta he might torment the two pet cranes who also were also part of the household. Meanwhile Schnap was being groomed for stardom. 'We rehearsed the second act without Konstantin Sergeyevich [Stanislavsky] yesterday,' Olga wrote to Chekhov in November 1903. 'I took Schnap along, so he had a chance to walk about and look around the stage, and today we've got the first act and he is going to have a go at acting. I'm worried that he's got too much of a pedigree .temperament, he isn't trained and he doesn't have any discipline. We'll see. He was greeted with laughter yesterday.'- Chekhov had got to know Schnap earlier that year and was alarmed at the prospect of seeing him on stage. He mmediately wrote back to tell
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Olga that what he actually had in mind for the play was a mangy, decrepit, shaggy little dog with a sour expression; snort-haired Schnap would not do.26
A few weeks later, in December 1903, Chekhov came up to Moscow himself to attend the final rehearsals. The premiere of The Cherry Orchard took place on 17 January 1904, his birthday, and was accompanied by a celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of his activity as a writer. He was by this time very ill, and only arrived at the theatre during the third act, at the express request of Nemirovich- Danchenko. What happened next was torture for him. As soon as Chekhov appeared on stage during the interval, representatives of almost every newspaper, journal and literary organization in the country stood up to read their eulogies to him. Telegrams from all over the country were read out, too, to prolonged and vociferous applause from the audience. Quite apart from his hatred of self-promotion and being in the limelight, Chekhov could barely stand up. He felt like the bookcase to which Gaev delivers a maudlin speech in Act 1 of the play.
A few weeks later, he travelled back to Yalta for the last time, taking Schnap with him, as well as his mother and Nastya, the new cook. He sent a letter to Olga before the steamer left Sevastopol, giving her a bulletin on their progress: 'Schnap feels quite at home, he is adorable. In the train he also felt quite at home; he barked at the guards and amused everybody, and now he is sitting on deck with his legs stretched out behind him. He has clearly already forgotten about Moscow, however terrible that is to contemplate.'27 It did not take Schnap long to settle in at the White Dacha. When he started barking a lot in a heavy bass, Chekhov felt he had successfully made the transition to mongrel,28 but he was not always pleased when Schnap came and lay down in his study because he was always dirty from playing with the dogs in the yard.29 Schnap soon had a routine which Olga was kept fully apprised of: Arseny took him to the market every day, and the rest of the time he spent walking round the garden, playing with the other dogs or sleeping downstairs by the warm ceramic stove, issuing the occasional groan. In the evenings he went upstairs to sleep in Chekhov's comfortable armchair by the fireplace and retired next door to Evgenia Yakovlevna's room at night.
Chapter 11 EXILE IN THE CRIMEA
I
\ * The Gentleman with the Little Dog
Yalta is Siberia!
Letter to Leonid Sredin, 26 December 1900
Chekhov found his second winter in Yalta just as difficult as the first. His sister came to stay over New Year then left, and friends were few and far between. His mother was ill; Tolstoy was ill down the road in nearby Gaspra; Levitan was ill. And he was ill. So many organs in his body had become superfluous through lack of use, he joked, that he had sold them to a Turk. Nevertheless, he complained that he had to put up with guests who came for interminable visits. He felt as though he had been living in Yalta a million years. It was not a good start to the rwenti ith century. Meanwhile what he craved was intellectual stimulation, music and beautiful women, and he longed to go on an intrepid adventure to somewhere like Africa - which is exactly what he recommended his new friend, the young writer Maxim Gorky, should do. He unfortunately no longer had the strength for travelling to exotic climes. Chekhov typically played it down, but it was clearly more than 'annoying' for him at the age of forty to be suffering from breathlessness and 'all kinds of other rubbish' which prevented him from living properly, as he put it. He also longed for Russia. There was no snow in Yalta, and no sleighs, and therefore it seemed to him that there was no life. It was particularly painful to be so far away from Moscow. Even though he could have purchased identical items locally in Yalta, he studiously ordered writing paper, galoshes, sausage, and even lavatory paper from Moscow, in denial that ne had moved.1
Bereft of stimulating company, and unable to do much in his garden over the winter, Chekhov found some consolation in the mongrels who had decided to settle in his yard and congregated round him whenever he stepped outside. There was the fierce, crooked-faced Tuzik who slept in the cellar (the Russian word for the ace in a pack of cards is 'tuz'). The yellow-eyed puppy who made its home under the ancitnt olive tree in the garden was christened Kashtanka, after Chekhov's famous early story about a dog who ends up as a circus performer (the name comes from the Russian word for 'chestnut'; Olga called him Ginger). Kashtanka would follow Tuzik's example and bark at people, but he was also prone to roll on to his stomach at the slightest opportunity, and acquired a reputation for laziness by sleeping all day on the wood chippings.2 Chekhov pretended not to care very much about Kashtanka. All the same, when the dog was run over by a passing carriage out in the road and broke one of his back legs, Chekhov performed emergency surgery and tended to him solicitously. Then there was the afore-mentioned Schnap, Olga's dachshund (called Foma to begin with by Masha and Anton,3 and Schwarz by Evgenia Yakovlevna4), whose arrival had been eagerly awaited by everyone at the White Dacha. 'Bring nim to Yalta, or he won't have anyone to bark at,' Chekhov had written to Olga in November 1902, considering '"here would then be enough dogs in the household.
When two more mongrel puppies turned up the following February and barked furiously all night, they were finally bundled up and put in someone else's yard. But a doctor acquaintance in Yalta decided to take Kashtanka in the spring of 1903, and Masha wrote to her brother (then staying at the dacha in Nara) to tell him that their cook, Polya, was so upset she had been crying, and Tuzik had stopped barking. They both immediately decided to find another dog. Kashtanka had become so lazy and gluttonous that Chekhov was not all that sorry to see him go, and instructed Arseny the gardener to look out for a small male mongrel puppy. That puppy was Sharik ('little ball'), a small white Pomeranian-mix with black ears and very sharp teeth, who took a while to learn how to bark, and then made up for it by barking day and night. Masha loved the dogs as much as her brother did, and over the years he kept her up to date on how they were faring in her absence: Tuzik appeared ever more crooked-faced, and occas'onally succumbed to pessimism5 (maybe he had a presentiment that he would be poisoned