Chekhov stuck to his independence. Money? His only hope lay in pressing Suvorin to hurry with a complete edition of all his stories. The proposal had been made long ago but was languishing, for the old man had left his business in the hands of his negligent sons, who were uninterested in complete editions and, in any case, were slow payers. Indeed they owed Chekhov five thousand rubles and payment was overdue. Reluctantly, Suvorin’s sons offered him twenty thousand rubles. While he was considering this he heard that a new publisher called Marx had just published Tolstoy’s Resurrection on generous terms, and Tolstoy had recommended that he go to Marx, who had the reputation of being sharp and cunning but who paid well. Unlike Su-rorin’s books, which were cheap and unattractive and intended for the mass market, Marx’s editions were elegandy bound and were well printed on decent paper. When Marx heard of Chekhov’s dilemma he at once offered him thirty thousand rubles, to be paid in installments. Chekhov consulted Suvorin, who pointed out the flaw in the offer. Marx was tricking him. He was proposing to buy outright all Chekhov’s copyrights, past, present and future. Chekhov’s level-headed sister agreed with Suvorin. She said she would take charge of his contracts, just as the Countess Tolstoy had so successfully done in defense of her children’s future when Tolstoy had renounced his royalties on ethical grounds. Like all authors, Chekhov knew, at heart, that the outright sale of copyrights was a folly, but he brushed that aside. His response was to push Marx’s offer up to seventy-five thousand, but he did refuse, happily, to include the copyrights on his plays and on all new works as published in periodicals. The contract was signed and he made one of his jokes: “I am a Marxist now.”
Suvorin said Chekhov would regret his decision, and indeed it was not long before he did. For years Marx made a fortune at Chekhov’s expense. Suvorin also said that he knew what would happen when Chekhov received his first installment: Chekhov would simply increase his charities. He did. He immediately gave away five thousand rubles as a contribution to the building of a new school on the outskirts of Yalta and one thousand rubles to his brother Alexander, who had at last given up drinking and needed the money to buy a new house. Anton also gave money for the education of the daughter of a needy man who had once slaved as underpaid apprentice at Chekhov’s side in his father’s shop at Taganrog.
Now Chekhov started looking for a site for a house in Yalta for his mother, his sister and himself. He was soon deep in mortgaging, for the sale of Melikhovo, which his sister was managing, took longer than he had hoped. There was a pause, during which he was looking for a site and finding a young and enterprising architect of sufficient originality, for he was eager to build a house that would be modern, original and a credit to the town. He was indeed building what would become his monument. His sister came down at last to see and approve the site. She was shocked at first when she was taken to a stretch of wasteland covered with scrub on the outskirts of the town: it had attracted Chekhov because the garden adjoined a Tatar cemetery. (As we know from his trip to Genoa and from the two moonlight scenes in the story Ionych, he had a poet’s response to cemeteries. Was not every grave a complete story or life history?) A Tatar funeral was taking place when he and his sister got there, and she was depressed by this ominous incident, but when they went back to his lodgings they were soon excited and laughing over his plans and his talk of the roses he would grow there, which would outdo the roses of Melikhovo. He wrote to his brother Mikhail, still pretending that the house was simply for the winter:
Nothing will be needed apart from the house, no outbuildings of any sort; it will all be under one roof. The coal, wood and everything will be in the basement. The hens lay the whole year round, and no special house is needed for them.
It was some time before Melikhovo was sold and the new house could be built and made fit for his mother and sister to live in. In the meantime he had moved them into a more comfortable flat in Moscow, where he could stay if he took a trip to the city. Meanwhile his health was deteriorating: he had little sleep at night and he could eat little. Still, there were good days in which, with the help of a Turkish gardener, he turned his little garden into a paradise of new trees and flowers. They made a pool, which was soon inhabited by frogs and, he said, “other crocodile-like creatures.” Two stray dogs had adopted him and also a crane, which followed him around. On the bad days he had prolonged headaches, when he could not work, and visitors noticed that he would stuff a bloodstained hankerchief into his pocket.
If the contract with Marx was dubious it had one benefit. In the first six months he had reread, corrected and judged a lifetime’s stories for the complete edition. Much of his early work had been done in a hurry: now he had to cut, tighten or reject. In his later work he had been alert to the false image or sentence. The danger—as we know from Henry James’s revisions—lay in the temptation to elaborate, but Chekhov was a cutter, sensitive to the musicality of simple language.
When, at last, Chekhov moved into his new house, which was far from being finished, he was alarmed to see how fast the installments of his contract with Marx melted away. He was cheered by the news that an old play of his, Uncle Vanya, had been successfully revived and played on tour in the provinces, but he told Gorky that he had given up the theater for good and was going back to writing nothing but stories. Rereading his own work had revived his imagination. He would soon be writing The Lady with the Little Dog and two of his surpassing masterpieces: In the Ravine and, above all, The Bishop.
We must go back a year to September 1898, when Chekhov was still at Melikhovo and had gone to Moscow and had seen the rehearsals of the new production of The Seagull. He was struck by the beauty and acting of Olga Knipper, who played the part of Irina. He wrote to Suvorin that her voice, her nobility and warmth were superb: “I felt choked with emotion. If I had stayed in Moscow I would have fallen in love with this Irina.” In the following year, when he had risked another trip to Moscow, he saw Olga again and took her to an exhibition of Levitan’s pictures. He met her family, who had relatives known to him in Yalta, and she had been brought by his sister to stay at Melikhovo. Olga’s father was an engineer of Alsatian origin, now working in Moscow. Her mother was Russian and a talented musician. Olga was going off on holiday to the Caucasus with her brother and Chekhov begged her to visit him in Yalta on her way back. At the age of thirty-eight he had fallen seriously in love. He wrote to her and she did not answer.
What does this mean? [he wrote]. Where are you? You are so stubborn in not sending news of yourself that … we are already thinking you have forgotten us and have got married in the Caucasus…. The author is forgotten—how terrible, how cruel, how perfidious!
She was ten years younger than himself.
She replied that his letters had made her “burst out laughing with joy.” He wrote again, arranging to meet her on her journey back from Batum and take her back to Yalta. She came and, very properly, stayed with the family of his doctor, and Chekhov stayed in an hotel near the harbor. Only one wing of his new house was finished, and she was depressed. She was worried about his health. She noticed that he never had regular meals, that he looked neglected and was soon tired. Although they met every day, she could rarely persuade him to have dinner with her at the doctor’s. He went back to Moscow with her, where she had a part in a new play, and they drove by carriage together on a memorable journey across the mountains. Their friendship warmed. It was not until the following summer that she came to Yalta again, when his mother and sister were in the house. By now Chekhov and Knipper were lovers.