Tolstoy’s visit provoked another hemorrhage. The doctor’s orders were severe. No more drinking or smoking. No more farming: he must give up his medical work for good. He must never again spend his winters in Melikhovo but must go south to Nice and join the rest of the European consumptives.
His brother Ivan took him by train to Melikhovo. Chekhov told his friends he was fairly well and only coughed in the mornings, but he did have migraines and there was trouble with his left eye. All the same, he was trying to pass as a man of twenty-eight, with some success, “because I buy expensive neckties and use Vera Violetta scent,” He has given up active work on the farm and does no more than prune roses and feed sparrows and talks of going to Egypt or to Sochi. At home they are cramming him with food but he does not put on weight. He has still got the building of two more schools on his hands, and he is fussing with his brother Alexander’s scheme of establishing a clinic for alcoholics, (The generous Suvorin was one of those who subscribed money to help this cause.) There, in his little hut on the estate—Chekhov put up a flag there when he was ready to receive guests—he was still in trouble with the censor about The Peasants and had to make further cuts in The Seagull.
Scores of guests poured in without mercy: Chekhov could not resist inviting them and his sister could not hold them off. One or two unscrupulous people stayed for weeks, brought their families, treating the place as a pension. His brother Alexander even had the nerve to send his two noisy sons down for the holidays.
To get away from the guests and against the doctor’s advice, Chekhov escaped secredy to Moscow for a night or two to see Lika Mizinova, who, like his Nina in The Seagull, had “shown stamina,” and had recovered from her folly. At last, when the summer came, he took the advice of the doctors—but after his own fashion: he went south, but via Paris, where he stayed a day or two with the Suvorins and went to the Moulin Rouge once more and saw the danse du ventre, and afterwards to Biarritz, where he took French lessons with a pretty French girl who promised to come to visit him later in Nice but who didn’t turn up. Biarritz delighted him. One seems to see the flashy necktie of the complete tourist as he sits on the plage and listens to the voice of the Bay of Biscay that “roars even on a calm day.” The bracing fashionable resort was full of instantly detectable and boring Russians. There were letters from Lika and he returned to his game with her.
All day I sit in the sun and think of you and why you love to write about lopsided things and I’ve decided … that your own sides are a bit wonky. You want people to realize this and find you attractive.
He loved her letters: “I value not only Reinheit in women, but also kindness.”
Then, in September, the Atlantic rain blew in and he got off at last to Nice and found a cheap room in the Pension Russe, 70 francs all in, and it had carpets everywhere—his Balzac-like passion—and a bed “like Cleopatra’s.”
Culture juts out of every shop window, every wicker basket, every dog smells of civilization.
The pension was always full of a mixed lot of bickering Russian ladies. He could not speak French but he could read it after a fashion. He was reading Voltaire.
He loved Nice and its cafés, its street noises, and the musicians who played under his windows. He liked the French égalité. The only bore was the mosquitoes, he said, “but I passionately love the sun.” Later, in December, he was spitting blood again. It wasn’t serious, but he found going upstairs exhausting. He wrote one or two slight stories: the famous Pecheneg, about the old Cossack officer (we have heard of him before in The Steppe) who had brought up his children as savages (they threw chickens into the air and shot them) and who bored his guests with his theories about the Golden Age. Then there is On the Cart, about the misery of a girl teaching in a rural school at Melikhovo—stories diat came from his memory:
I have never written directly from Nature. I have let my memory sift the subject, so that only what is important or typical is left in it as in a filter.
In January 1898 he read in the French papers that Émile Zola was being prosecuted for libel in his famous letter J’accuse. The attack on Zola in the conservative Russian press, especially in Suvorin’s paper New Time, infuriated Chekhov. He set about a thorough study of the Dreyfus case and protested fiercely to the aging Suvorin, who was, after all, the proprietor if not now the editor:
You write [he wrote to Suvorin] that you are annoyed with Zola. Here everyone feels as though a new, better Zola has arisen. In his trial he has been cleansed as though in turpentine from grease-spots, and now shines before the French in his true brilliance. There is a purity and moral elevation that was not suspected in him. You should follow the whole scandal from the beginning.
He went on to write that
a brew has been gradually concocted on the basis of anti-Semitism, a principle reeking of the slaughterhouse. When something is wrong with us we seek the cause outside ourselves … capitalism, the Masons, the Syndicate, the Jesuits—all phantoms, but how they do relieve our anxieties!
He reminded Suvorin of Dr. Fyodor Haas, who in the previous generation had spent his personal income on prison reform; of Korolenko, who saved the Multans from forced labor—a Finnish-speaking people, resident in the Russian Empire, who had been falsely accused of making sacrifices to pagan gods. Yes, Chekhov agreed, Zola was not Voltaire, “nor are any of us Voltaires, but there comes a time when not being a Voltaire is as irrelevant as can be.”
Chekhov had read the stenographic notes of Zola’s trial. He wrote to his brother Alexander, who was now employed by New Time, that the paper had behaved abominably:
The old man and I have exchanged letters on the subject (in a tone of great moderation, however), and have both dropped the subject. I don’t want to write and I don’t want his letters in which he keeps justifying the tactlessness of his paper by saying he loves the military.
Was there a break with Suvorin after this protest? Many of Chekhov’s friends hoped for it. But no. Chekhov knew how generous Suvorin had been with financial help for his school building at Melikhovo. On the other hand, he did say that “the old man,” who was now in his sixties, had left the running of his paper to his reactionary young sons.
More seriously, at the beginning of 1899 there was a students’ strike in Petersburg on the anniversary of the foundation of the university. The new generation of students were radicals and the new Tsar had turned out to be more reactionary than his predecessor. The police were called in to disperse the students in Moscow, to which the rioting had spread, and there was a threat of forcing them into military service. Suvorin’s paper supported the authorities and was boycotted by the students. Chekhov told his brother Alexander that he was sorry for the old man: “but I’m not at all sorry for those who are surrounding him.” There had long been a rumor that the paper had taken a subsidy from the government and the French General Staff. Suvorin was called upon to appear at a “Court of Honor” by a writers’ committee known as the Self-Aid Committee. Suvorin refused and Chekhov supported him in this.
In an Asiatic country, where freedom of the press and freedom of conscience do not exist, where the government and nine-tenths of society look upon a journalist as an enemy, where life is so cramped and vile, where there is little hope of better times—in such a country amusements like pouring slops on one another in Courts of Honor etc. put writers in the ridiculous and pathetic position of little caged animals biting each other’s tails off.