Letters of Anton Chekhov to His Family and Friends
fully satisfied with the life there. He liked the warmth and the people he
met, M. Kovalevsky, V. M. Sobolesky, V. T. Nemirovitch-Dantchenko, the
artist V. T. Yakobi and I. N. Potapenko. Prince A. I. Sumbatov arrived at
Nice too, and Chekhov used sometimes to go with him to Monte Carlo to
roulette.
Chekhov followed all that he had left behind in Russia with keen attention:
he was anxious about the _Chronicle of Surgery_, which he had more than
once saved from ruin, made arrangements about Melihovo, and so on.
He spent the autumn and winter in Nice, and in February, 1898, meant to go
to Africa. He wanted to visit Algiers and Tunis, but Kovalevsky, with whom
he meant to travel, fell ill, and he had to give up the project. He
contemplated a visit to Corsica, but did not carry out that plan either, as
he was taken seriously ill himself. A wretched dentist used contaminated
forceps in extracting a tooth, and Chekhov was attacked by periostitis in a
malignant form. In his own words, “he was in such pain that he climbed up
the wall.”
As soon as the spring had come he felt an irresistible yearning for Russia.
He was weary of enforced idleness; he missed the snow and the Russian
country, and at the same time he was depressed at having gained no weight
in spite of the climate, good nourishment, and idleness.
While he was at Nice France was in the throes of the Dreyfus affair.
Chekhov began studying the Dreyfus and Zola cases from shorthand notes, and
becoming convinced of the innocence of both, wrote a heated letter to
Suvorin, which led to a coolness between them.
He spent March, 1898, in Paris. He sent three hundred and nineteen volumes
of French literature from Paris to the public library at Taganrog.
The lateness of the spring in Russia forced Chekhov to remain in Paris till
May, when he returned to Melihovo. Melihovo became gay and lively on his
arrival. Visitors began coming again; he was as hospitable as ever, but he
was quieter, no longer jested as in the past, and perhaps owing to his
illness talked little. But he still took as much pleasure in his roses.
After a comparatively good summer there came days of continual rain, and on
the 14th of September Chekhov went away to Yalta. He had to choose between
Nice and Yalta. He did not want to go abroad, and preferred the Crimea,
reckoning that he might possibly seize an opportunity to pay a brief visit
to Moscow, where his plays were to appear at the Art Theatre. His choice
did not disappoint him. That autumn in Yalta was splendid; he felt well
there, and the progress of his disease led him to settle in Yalta
permanently.
Chekhov obtained a piece of land at Autka, and the same autumn began
building. He spent whole days superintending the building. Stone and
plaster was brought, Turks and Tatars dug the ground and laid the
foundation, while he planted little trees and watched with fatherly anxiety
every new shoot on them. Every stone, every tree there is eloquent of
Chekhov’s creative energy. That same autumn he bought the little property
of Kutchuka. It was twenty-four miles from Yalta, and attracted him by its
wildness and primitive beauty. To reach it one had to drive along the road
at a giddy height. He began once more dreaming and drawing plans. The
possible future began to take a different shape to him now, and he was
already dreaming of moving from Melihovo, farming and gardening and living
there as in the country. He wanted to have hens, cows, a horse and donkeys,
and, of course, all of this would have been quite possible and might have
been realized if he had not been slowly dying. His dreams remained dreams,
and Kutchuka stands uninhabited to this day.
The winter of 1898 was extremely severe in the Crimea. The cold, the snow,
the stormy sea, and the complete lack of people akin to him in spirit and
of “interesting women” wearied Chekhov; he began to be depressed. He was
irresistibly drawn to the north, and began to fancy that if he moved for
the winter to Moscow, where his plays were being acted with such success
and where everything was so full of interest for him, it would be no worse
for his health than staying in Yalta, and he began dreaming of buying a
house in Moscow. He wanted at one moment to get something small and snug in
the neighbourhood of Kursk Station, where it might be possible to stay the
three winter months in every comfort; but when such a house was found his
mood changed and he resigned himself to life at Yalta.
The January and February of 1899 were particularly irksome to Chekhov: he
suffered from an intestinal trouble which poisoned his existence. Moreover
consumptive patients from all over Russia began appealing to him to assist
them to come to Yalta. These invalids were almost always poor, and on
reaching Yalta mostly ended their lives in miserable conditions, pining for
their native place. Chekhov exerted himself on behalf of everyone, printed
appeals in the papers, collected money, and did his utmost to alleviate
their condition.
After the unfavourable winter came an exquisite warm spring, and on the
12th of April Chekhov was in Moscow and by May in Melihovo. His father had
died the previous October, and with his death a great link with the place
was broken. The consciousness of having to go away early in the autumn
gradually brought Chekhov to decide to sell the place.
On the 25th of August he went back to his own villa at Yalta, and soon
afterwards Melihovo was sold, and his mother and sister joined him. During
the last four and a half years of his life Chekhov’s health grew rapidly
worse. His chief interest was centred in Moscow, in the Art Theatre, which
had just been started, and the greater part of his dramatic work was done
during this period.
Chekhov was ill all the winter of 1900, and only felt better towards the
spring. During those long winter months he wrote “In the Ravine.” The
detestable spring of that year affected his mood and his health even more.
Snow fell on the 5th of March, and this had a shattering effect on him. In
April he was again very ill. An attack of intestinal trouble prevented him
from eating, drinking, or working. As soon as it was over Chekhov, homesick
for the north, set off for Moscow, but there he was met by severe weather.
Returning in August to Yalta, he wrote “The Three Sisters.”
He spent the autumn in Moscow, and at the beginning of December went to the
French Riviera, settled in Nice, and dreamed again of a visit to Africa,
but went instead to Rome. Here, as usual, he met with severe weather. Early
in February he returned to Yalta. That year there was a soft, sunny spring.
Chekhov spent whole days in the open air, engaged in his favourite
occupations; he planted and pruned trees, looked after his garden, ordered
all sorts of seeds, and watched them coming up. At the same time he was
working on behalf of the invalids coming to Yalta, who appealed to him for
help, and also completing the library he had founded at Taganrog, and
planning to open a picture gallery there.
In May, 1901, Chekhov went to Moscow and was thoroughly examined by a
physician, who urged him to go at once to Switzerland or to take a koumiss
cure. Chekhov preferred the latter.
On the 25th of May he married Olga Knipper, one of the leading actresses at
the Art Theatre, and with her went off to the province of Ufa for the
koumiss cure. On the way they had to wait twenty-four hours for a steamer,
in very unpleasant surroundings, at a place called Pyany Bor (“Drunken
Market”), in the province of Vyatka.
In the autumn of 1901 Tolstoy was staying, for the sake of his health, at
Gaspra. Chekhov was very fond of him and frequently visited him. Altogether
that autumn was an eventful one for him: Kuprin, Bunin and Gorky visited
the Crimea; the writer Elpatyevsky settled there also, and Chekhov felt
fairly well. Tolstoy’s illness was the centre of general attention, and
Chekhov was very uneasy about him.
In 1902 there was suddenly a change for the worse: violent haemorrhage
exhausted him till the beginning of February; he was for over a month
confined to his study. It was at this time that the incident of Gorky’s
election to the Academy and subsequent expulsion from it led Chekhov to
write a letter to the Royal President of the Academy asking that his own
name should be struck off the list of Academicians.
Chekhov had hardly recovered when his wife was taken seriously ill. When
she was a little better he made a tour by the Volga and the Kama as far as
Perm. On his return he settled with his wife in a summer villa not far from
Moscow; he spent July there and returned home to Yalta in August. But the
longing for a life of movement and culture, the desire to be nearer to the
theatre, drew him to the north again, and in September he was back in
Moscow. Here he was not left in peace for one minute; swarms of visitors
jostled each other from morning till night. Such a life exhausted him; he
ran away from it to Yalta in December, but did not escape it there. His
cough was worse; every day he had a high temperature, and these symptoms
were followed by an attack of pleurisy. He did not get up all through the
Christmas holidays; he still had an agonizing cough, and it was in this
enforced idleness that he thought out his play “The Cherry Orchard.”
It is quite possible that if Chekhov had taken care of himself his disease
would not have developed so rapidly or proved fatal. The feverish energy of
his temperament, his readiness to respond to every impression, and his
thirst for activity, drove him from south to north and hack again,
regardless of his health and of the climate. Like all invalids, he ought to
have gone on living in the same place, at Nice or at Yalta, until he was
better, but he lived exactly as though he had been in good health. When he
arrived in the north he was always excited and absorbed by what was going
on, and this exhilaration he mistook for an improvement in his health; but
he had only to return to Yalta for the reaction to set in, and it would
seem to him at once that his case was hopeless, that the Crimea had no
beneficial effect on consumptives, and that the climate was wretched.
The spring of 1903 passed fairly favourably. He recovered sufficiently to
go to Moscow and even to Petersburg. On returning from Petersburg he began
preparing to go to Switzerland. But his state of health was such that his
doctor in Moscow advised him to give up the idea of Switzerland and even of
Yalta, and to stay somewhere not very far from Moscow. He followed this
advice and settled at Nar. Now that it was proposed that he should stay the
winter in the north, all that he had created in Yalta--his house and his
garden--seemed unnecessary and objectless. In the end he returned to Yalta
and set to work on “The Cherry Orchard.”
In October, 1903, the play was finished and he set off to produce it
himself in Moscow. He spent days at a time in the Art Theatre, producing
his “Cherry Orchard,” and incidentally supervising the setting and
performance of the plays of other authors. He gave advice and criticized,
was excited and enthusiastic.
On the 17th of January, 1904, “The Cherry Orchard” was produced for the
first time. The first performance was the occasion of the celebration of
the twenty-fifth anniversary of Chekhov’s literary activity. A great number
of addresses were read and speeches were made. Chekhov was many times
called before the curtain, and this expression of universal sympathy
exhausted him to such a degree that the very day after the performance he
began to think with relief of going back to Yalta, where he spent the
following spring.
His health was completely shattered, and everyone who saw him secretly