And again he wrote to her:
You say I used to be younger. Yes, imagine! I have passed thirty some time ago and already feel forty close at hand. I have grown old, not in body only, but in spirit…. I get up and go to bed feeling as though interest in life had dried up in me.
These are not the words of a cold-hearted man who is amusing himself. He was indeed self-protective: no saint but certainly not cruel. He had a strict conscience and yet one sees him restless, burning himself out. The gende skeptical Chekhov is also the greedy observer. He will stand by his principles and yet be unknowable both in his reserve and in his laughter. In her old age and long after his death, his sister wrote about his feelings for Lika:
I do not know what was in my brother’s mind, but that it seemed to me that he strove to overcome his feelings [for Lika]. In her there were certain traits alien to him: a lack of character and a fondness for a Bohemian existence.
Defeated, Lika had an affair in Paris with Potapenko. She soon found herself deserted, pregnant, wretched and alone in Switzerland. She wrote to Chekhov and told him her story. He replied:
[T]hough you … taunt me with having rejected you, yet thank you all the same; I know perfectly well you are not going to the, and that no one has rejected you.
He himself went off on one of his sudden journeys to the south for his health. He says he simply must “write, write and write.” And then comes the usual fantasy:
Dear Lika, when you become a great singer and are paid a handsome salary, then be charitable to me, marry me, keep me at your expense, that I may be free to do nothing.
There is something odd about Chekhov’s journey. There were indeed two journeys: one with Potapenko in August 1894 down the Volga, in which Potapenko said nothing about his betrayal of Lika, and another, three weeks later, when Chekhov went off again to see his uncle Mitrofan, who was dying, then on an erratic trip to Odessa, Lvov, Vienna, Abbazia, Trieste and Venice, where he caught nettle rash, on to Genoa, whose ornate cemetery he visited, and finally to Nice, where he found the letter from Lika that told her wretched story. She was in Switzerland:
There is not a trace of the old Lika left and I cannot really say that you are to blame for it…. If you are not afraid to be disappointed you may come…. Still I don’t think you will cast a stone at me. It seems to me you were always indifferent.
Later she wrote: “What was I to do, Daddy?”
He replied that he was not indifferent to people, and that is indeed true, but he did not visit her in Switzerland. It is odd that he went on these long haphazard journeys; odder too that before he left he did not tell his family and even forgot to leave them with money.
Chekhov had supposed that Abbazia would be an innocent, antiquated little place. It turned out to be a new tourist trap, with up-to-date hotels where the rich Russian landowners, with their wives or mistresses, confided their debts or their love affairs at the top of their voices, very much in the manner of Ivanov in his play of that name. Chekhov uses Abbazia as the background to a short scene in his story Ariadne, which also has some Italian background. Ariadne is a beautiful, fickle young woman. She contracts a liaison with a landowner, Shamokhin, and the story consists of his frustrations and sufferings, as confided in the narrator, an author by profession. Shamokhin says that when Germans or English meet they talk of nothing but their business or their crops, whereas
[we Russians] discuss nothing but abstract subjects and women. … A mediocre philosopher like Max Nordau would explain these incessant conversations about women as a form of erotic madness, or would put it down to our having been slave-owners…. I take … a different view. … we are dissatisfied [with women] because we are idealists.
He evokes Ariadne’s spell when he knew her as a willful and spoiled young girl who so fascinated him that he has almost ruined himself and his father to pay for her extravagances. He believes he can hold her by educating her, for he sees her predatory habits arise from lack of education, and he has been dragging her around art galleries and museums and has introduced her to celebrated and learned men. She simply pretends to know what they are talking about; indeed she is a natural liar in everything. This comedy is well done, for Ariadne is not a caricature of the socialite, though it must be said that Chekhov does rather press his serious view that women need to be emancipated and trained, as males are trained. To be brought up only as a sheltered wife and mother is wrong. Considering the idleness of Shamokhin, his talk is comic. On the other hand, there is no doubt of Ariadne’s beauty and allure. She loves her beautiful body and its spell and is entranced by gazing at it. She is proud of her erotic nature. (Earlier, in The Duel, Chekhov had shown some Tolstoyan disgust when, in his account of the bedroom scene, the lady herself has no shame.)
In Petersburg the gossip was that Ariadne was drawn from the actress Yavorskaya, who was briefly Chekhov’s mistress and who was notorious for her passion for publicity. She had once stayed at Melikhovo because Chekhov was “a famous man” and the acquaintance would give a push to her career. She said that Chekhov had been in love with her. She encouraged the rumor and was far from displeased by the tale. She later intrigued for a part in The Seagull but there he firmly turned her down.
In An Anonymous Story Chekhov turns a possible Ariadne into a very different figure. It is an unbelievable venture into the glossy well-worn subject of the Sins of Society. Perhaps it springs from his observation of the rich and cynical company Suvorin kept in Petersburg, a city Chekhov hated. An Anonymous Story is a confession. We see a young naval officer who has joined a secret group of terrorists disguise himself as a footman to a rich top Petersburg official called Orlov in order to spy on him and go through his papers. The weakness of the story is that we never see or hear of any of the “footman’s” comrades or their “Cause.” Dostoyevsky had never made that kind of mistake. Orlov has a mistress, a married woman (Zinaida), who insists on leaving home and coming to live with him, much to his dismay. The “footman” falls in love with her, studies her, obeys her orders and notes her determination to take charge of Orlov’s household. She even wants to cook, and yet she has been reading Turgenev and sees herself, he thinks, as the luxurious Odin-tsova in Fathers and Sons. When the corrupt Orlov is unfaithful to her the “footman” nobly rescues her and escapes with her to Nice and Venice. The two are not lovers, for she is pregnant by Orlov and indeed dies in giving birth to a baby girl. There is even a suggestion that she has poisoned herself. The plot and scene are plain Ouida: it is an odd fact that Chekhov had read Ouida with admiration! Before the girl’s death the “footman” confesses that he has broken with the terrorists on principle. She comes to life in our minds when she points out that he has done this simply because he has no character, no will of his own. She knows his only “terrorist” act had been slapping the face of one of Orlov’s important friends with a bunch of newspapers! The good things in the story are the thumbnail portraits of Orlov’s corrupt, card-playing and wenching friends. There is also a neat portrait of Zinaida’s thieving maid. Orlov’s polished cynicism is well observed. Chekhov noted that Orlov reads a great deal but that “even when he reads” there is a look of irony on his face. Chekhov admitted that he had “botched” the end of the tale.
It is a relief to see him turning to the world he really knows in two genuine stories: The Teacher of Literature, into which he dipped when he came to writing The Three Sisters; and the one he once called his favorite among all his works, The Student. It is certainly one of his most tender, subtle and poetic allegories. It may have been suggested by the simple religious parables that Tolstoy was writing at this time, or by the pious Leskov’s mystical tales, though, unlike Leskov, Chekhov was a confirmed atheist. Chekhov’s story takes a step far beyond trite religious insinuation, and if it is a parable, it is a parable about the imagination. On the eve of Good Friday a young and pious theological student is seen walking home along empty marshland in a bitterly cold wind and he is thinking: