I shan't come to Yalta; think and you'll realize why. It's impossible. You have such a sensitive soul and yet you invite me! Can you really not understand? Anton made a joke of her refusaclass="underline" she had a lover in Petersburg; he did have a wife, but would divorce her; he had brought expensive perfume for her to fetch from Yalta. On 7 March, he gave in: 'Let me make you a proposal.' Olga held out: How can I come?… How long must we stay hidden? And what's the point? Because of people? People are more likely to shut up and leave us in peace once they see it's an accomplished fact. Although he loathed trains and hotels, Anton announced he would come to Moscow. To Bunin (who, himself seeking a divorce, had to repress his horror) he made his first unambiguous written declaration: 'By the way, I intend to marry.' He told Olga he was coming to Moscow, but stressed that she would 'get a grandfather, not a spouse.' He would let her act for five more years. A week after this letter Olga told members of the theatre that she had resolved: 'to unite my life to that of Anton Chekhov.' But she still did not have from Anton the firm offer on which she was insisting: We cannot live just as though we were good friends… to see your mother's suffering, ivlasha's puzzled face - it's awful! In your house I'm between two fires. Say something about this. You never say anything. I have to have a bit of peace now. I am terribly tired. She dared not drag Anton to Moscow's frozen air, but, faced with her conditions for coming down to Yalta, Anton was now backing off. He wrote to Bunin on 25 March: 'I've changed my mind about marrying, I don't want to but all the same… then if I must I shall.' Shortly after Masha had left for Yalta, it was Olga who gave in. She telegraphed: 'Leaving tomorrow Yalta' and got the reply, 'Expect arrival'. On Good Friday, 30 March 1901, she was there.
Bunin was also there for the two weeks that Masha and Olga stayed. They went to the seaside cottage at Gurzuf, where they picnicked, and Anton wrote Bunin a joke bill for his share. When Masha left for Moscow and Bunin for Odessa, Olga left with them. She cried bitterly all the way to Moscow - Masha believed it was from a tooth abscess. Olga's letter to Anton suggests otherwise:
FEBRUARY-MAY IOOI
There was no need to separate… It was for decency, was it?… You stayed silent. I decided that you did not want me to be with you once Masha had left. Que dim ê monde? There is a sediment of things left unsaid. I was so looking forward to spring, and now I've just been on a visit… everyone in Moscow was amazed to see me… Come soon; let's get married and clear off, do you want to? The next day Olga wrote, 'You have already cooled towards me, you don't look at me as somebody close… you don't like all this woman's chatter.'
While Olga Knipper was in Yalta, Olga Vasilieva let Anton know that she had come to Gurzuf for two months with her foster-child Marusia: 'Will you curse me very much for my desire to have one more look at you? Your Marusia is a wonderful child, but I get very spiteful with her.' At the beginning of April she sent her photograph to Anton's mother and wrote that she was bequeathing Marusia to Anton, as thanks for all the happiness and joy you brought me with your visits in Nice - after Mama's death I was never so happy and shan't be. Marusia is a good, kind child - I am not worthy of her. I often envy her that I cannot, as she can, count on an affectionate word from you. A week later she wired: 'Voudrais venir Gourzouff etre plus pres vous, puis-je, ne vous fachez pas.' Anton replied that there was a hotel in Gurzuf and sent regards to 'our daughter Marusia', telling her to behave 'or else daddy will get angry and pick up the cane'. A week after Easter Anton arranged to see them. Vasilieva had moved to Autka, to the house next door. She sent Anton coins, ostensibly as a pledge for a loan to pay her landlady. The day that Bunin, Masha and Olga left, Anton wrote to Vasilieva. He told her that he did not mind her living next door with no chaperone.68
Anton's reply to Olga Knipper, however, was as intimate a letter as she would ever receive from him: I didn't keep you because I hate being in Yalta and I also had the idea that we would soon meet anyway in freedom… you had no reason to be angry… I had no secret thoughts. He appealed to her pity and theatrical ambitions:
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THREE IKIUMIMIS
My cough takes all my energy and 1 think languidly about the future and am reluctant to write… Occasionally I have a very strong desire to write a 4-act farce or comedy for the Arts Theatre. And if I do, if nothing gets in the way, I shan't give it to the theatre before the end of 1903 They would marry and honeymoon anywhere, the Black Sea or the Arctic Ocean. Anton undertook to bring his passport to Moscow for the ceremony: she was now 'Olia', his 'little Lutheran', his 'dog', as henceforth she signed her letters to him. He would marry her the day he arrived 'so long as you promise nobody will know in Moscow': he loathed congratulations, champagne and having to maintain a fixed smile. Waiting for health and warm weather, he chatted every day with Kuprin, a fascinating companion who, as he later boasted, had done everything in life except get pregnant. Anton's notebooks reflect a darker mood: a feeling of non-love, a peaceful state, long, peaceful thoughts… love is either the remains of something degenerating or part of something that will develop in the future into something enormous, but in the present it doesn't satisfy, it gives far less than you expect. Olga's next letter to Anton contained an inauspicious joke: 'The revolting Vishnevsky swears by God and crosses his heart that in a year or two I'll be his wife - how about that!' A Grand Duchess, Olga said, had accosted her mother and asked, 'When is her marriage, and how is his health?' Thus Anna Knipper learnt of the betrothal.69 Anton said he would write a will forbidding Olga to remarry after his death. For a fortnight he pleaded illness: he was locked in his study, thinking and coughing. He worried about Vania, who was, although never complaining, barely communicating, in fact, overworked and losing weight; about Gorky and Posse, the editor of Life, in prison; about his sick dog; about Olga Vasilieva leaving for France. On 6 May he had a talk with Vasilieva. He deterred his Taganrog cousins from visiting Yalta: Evgenia might be in Petersburg, Masha in Moscow and he in the Arctic or on the Volga.
When Anton came to Moscow a week later, he had his first breakfast with Olga Vasilieva, not Olga Knipper, so that he could introduce Dr Chlenov the venereologist to Vasilieva the potential patron for his clinic. On 16 May Masha left for Yalta to care for Evgenia. On
II.IIIUIAHV-MAY I9OI
17 May Anton went, under duress, to see Dr Shchurovsky, who after a thorough examination and interrogation took a full history. Anton gave wild guesses when asked how long his relatives had lived. He admitted that coughing and diarrhoea had plagued him since infancy and haemorrhages for the past seventeen years. Shchurovsky noted70 that Anton drank moderately, had given up smoking, that he had not had syphilis, but had been treated for, and cured of, gonorrhoea. Shchurovsky suspected that Anton's childhood 'peritonitis' might be due to a hernia. He found Anton's mental state good and his nerves 'tolerable'. (Anton assured Shchurovsky that his depression was 'autointoxication' due to constipation and lifted after a dose of castor oil.) The lungs, however, were bad, with irreversible necrosis, and his gut was badly affected. Severe pulmonary damage and chronic colitis, Shchurovsky hoped, might respond to koumiss, a treatment Anton had not tried. Anton was referred to Dr Varavka at the Andreev sanatorium, in the wilds of Bashkiria, 1200 miles east of Moscow. Olga wrote to Masha the next day: There is not much comfort - the process has not stopped. He prescribed him a course of koumiss drinking and if he can't, then it's Switzerland. I am cooking up a medicine for Anton, I pound it in the mortar, I let it stand and I boil it, it's for the intestines. God grant that the koumiss does him good! As soon as I sort everything out, we are off. I am awfully sad. Masha, why did you go away! I am sad and afraid.7' Olga told Masha everything, except that she and Anton were about to marry. Anton wrote to Masha two days later to say that both lungs now had lesions, that he had the choice of fermented mares' milk in the Urals or Switzerland for two months. As for the wedding and the journey with Olga to the Urals, he even now denied it: 'It's boring to go on one's own, it's boring to be on the koumiss, but taking somebody with me would be selfish… I would get married but I don't have the papers on me, everything is in the desk in Yalta.' He asked for a few blank cheques. Masha wanted him back in Yalta.