He warned Suvorin about his politics: “Drive nature out of the door and she’ll fly in by the window.” And when Suvorin’s wife reproached Chekhov for not coming strongly forward in defence of his generous benefactor and friend, he said:
Whatever people are saying now they have been saying for a long time everywhere, and you and your husband did not know the truth, as kings do not know the truth.
Chekhov told his friends he liked Suvorin very much but that he had “never known a man so irresolute and lacking in character.”
Chekhov’s friends were noticing that, whatever he said about his health, he had aged. His beard was turning gray and behind the glasses of his pince-nez his eyes were narrower; his smile was dim and his jokes were few. In Nice the painter Braz made a second attempt at painting his portrait, and indeed it is the picture of a melancholy and defeated man. Chekhov wrote: “If I have become a pessimist and write gloomy tales then the fault is in this portrait of me.
He was getting tired of Nice and wanted to get back to Melikhovo. Euphoria and desperation alternate in the classical condition of the consumptive. He falls back on the reckless optimism and the skills of his affections. Skills? He was still pursued by the relentless Lydia Avilova and eventually hit upon the solution of diverting her by getting her to hunt through magazines for copies of his early stories, which he had lost, so that he could revise them for a collected edition of his works. She eagerly agreed. It was a strange cure but it seemed to calm her. It is again noticeable that he still had the art of turning his half-love-affairs into friendships. Once more we have to suppose that his sexual temperature was low.
Chapter Fourteen
Chekhov at last surrendered to his doctors and agreed that he must now spend every winter in the Crimea at Yalta. Before he left he had seen Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko, who had recently founded the Moscow Art Theater and were anxious to include The Seagull in the repertoire of their first season. The earlier failure of the play still embittered Chekhov but he gave in. He mistrusted Stanislavsky and his literal realism, especially his taste for banal “noises off”—the croaking of frogs, the chirping of grasshoppers and the barking of dogs. One of the actors told him that Stanislavsky wanted to bring in a crying baby among the servants who come to say good-bye to Arkadina at the end of the play. All the same, public hostility to The Seagull had gone. The following year when he left Yalta on a short defiant trip and went back to Moscow, the company put on a private performance for him “without the stage sets,” and he complained. He said that he could not judge the play dispassionately. He said the actress who played Nina gave an abominable performance, sobbing violently: that Trigorin walked and talked like a paralytic without “a will of his own.” Still, he did say honestly that the play gripped him “so that I could hardly believe it was I who had written it.” In spite of his “war with the bacilli,” he did not want to leave Moscow. He was very excited by the revival of his play.
Lovely actresses! If I’d stayed on any longer I should have lost my head. The older I get, the faster and stronger does the pulse of life beat in me.
The play was now an enormous success.
In his rooms at Yalta in 1898 Chekhov said he felt “locked in.” Patriotically, he said the little resort was more agreeable and cleaner than Nice. The warmth of the sea, the mountains and especially the flowers delighted him, though he found the leaves of the southern trees metallic. The claims of Yalta to be the cultural capital of the Crimea were absurd. Fame in Petersburg or Moscow was an excitement: one kept to one’s set. But in Yalta the public thought they owned you personally and you were on duty for tedious chats in the street or sudden callers. He was not a man to say no, and he soon found himself elected as a trustee of the girls’ secondary school and going into the question of building a new sanatorium for the population of consumptives and—of all minor annoyances—becoming a kind of estate agent. Doctors in Moscow plagued him for addresses where they could send their patients.
The railway had not yet reached the town. To leave one had to take the steamer to Sevastopol and drive over the mountains to the nearest railway station. Books took weeks to arrive; the mail was erratic. He remembered that years before in Yalta he had written A Dreary Story, which had established his fame as a writer. Now he knew he had matured and was free to look back. We find him telling a correspondent that the lazy man has time for listening to more people than the man who sticks to his desk all day, who “hears little” and is really shut up in a shell.
Listening is Chekhov’s impulse in the three new stories he is now working on. They are linked stories of remembering: The Man in a Case, Gooseberries and About Love, in which the talkers will talk of love “in the Russian fashion.” We have heard this kind of declamation in Ariadne; now Chekhov frames these three stories so that they will be a series. We see two friends on a shooting holiday in the country, sleeping rough, in a barn, and telling their stories in the evening. Burkin, the schoolmaster in The Man in a Case, tells about a former colleague of his, Belikov, a teacher of Greek. He is distinctly a character of Gogolian absurdity. He is a petty tyrant, a frightened bachelor who hates all innovation, all pleasure, and above all fears the dangers of freedom; he has a terror of “repercussions” and worships official edicts. He is compared to a hermit crab:
His great feat was to sport galoshes and an umbrella even on the finest days and he always wore a warm padded greatcoat. He kept his umbrella in a holder, his watch in a gray chamois-leather bag.
All the masters at the school, including the headmaster himself, unite in an intrigue to get Belikov married. They find a hearty, shouting Ukrainian girl who cannot stop laughing. They might have succeeded, but unfortunately Belikov sees she has gone recklessly in for the new, morally subversive craze for bicycling. There had been signs, up till then, that he was attracted to her, but now he goes to the length of protesting to her brother, who is also a cyclist, and threatens to protest to the authorities. In an angry scene the brother pushes him downstairs. Belikov is broken. His health goes. He dies, and the Ukrainian girl bursts into tears at his funeral. “Ukrainian girls can only cry or laugh,” says the narrator. ‘They have no intermediate mood.” Still, “it’s a great pleasure, frankly, burying a Belikov.” But, the storyteller adds, “what a lot of other such encapsulated people remain, and what a lot of them the future holds in store!”
The next story, Gooseberries, is told by the veterinary surgeon. The sportsmen are soaked by rain and are given shelter by an old friend, Alyokhin, who slaves in his fields. He stops work to lead them to his handsome manor. He himself works so hard that he has not washed for months. He takes them first to his millpond. The water looks filthy— “cold, muddy and malignant”—but the veterinarian dives in. We see water lilies rock as he goes to the bottom again and again and comes up crying out, “Oh my goodness, oh Lord have mercy on me!” as he floats to enjoy the rain pouring onto his face. At the house they all clean up and go to Alyokhin’s elegant drawing room, where they see his beautiful servant Pelageya. The veterinarian then tells the story of his brother, a civil servant. He married a rich widow, who soon conveniendy died and left him all her money, after which he bought an estate in the country. He has become self-indulgent and gluttonous, especially of the irresistible gooseberries he has cultivated. He believes that the peasants, whom he corrupts with kegs of vodka, love him because he calls himself a gentleman. The veterinarian warns his friends about the deceits of country bliss and comfort. He says: