The shock of his marriage was felt most strongly by his sister, for she had been closer to him than anyone else in his working life. Mariya (“Masha”) had managed his practical affairs. Her help had been indispensable in his social doctoring and in the building of schools at Melikhovo and in the detail of organizing his complex practical fight against the cholera. She had sacrificed her chances of marriage. When she had been with Chekhov in the Ukraine they had spent some time with a landowner, Alexander Smagin, who had fallen in love with her and she with him. Smagin indeed had come to stay at Melikhovo, and she asked her brother anxiously what she should do. He stared at her for a long time and said nothing. She read the meaning of it: she broke with Smagin, and she wrote after her brother’s death that he had made two people who loved each other miserably unhappy for years. Chekhov’s blank stare was unanswerable. It is extraordinary to see Chekhov become as ruthless as the woman teacher who destroys the love affair of her pretty sister in The House with the Mezzanine.
Now, deeply hurt above all because Olga, who had been her friend, had not confided in her, Mariya struggled to master her distress. She wrote to her brother: “For me you have always been the nearest and dearest person and your happiness is my only concern.” And then, overwrought, she made an extraordinary proposaclass="underline" she asked to be allowed to visit the couple on their honeymoon. He replied that he and Olga would be delighted by this. Mariya, wisely, decided not to join them.
The journey to Ufa had enlivened the traveler. Everything went well, despite the primitive condition of the sanatorium. The oak woods around it were beautiful. Chekhov delighted in the wildflowers and was thrilled by the droves of wild horses and, of course, went fishing. He made an effort to drink bottle after bottle of mares’ milk and his weight went up at once. Olga and he were happy, though he hated to be without books and having to depend on newspapers that were a year old. He missed, above all, the talk of his intellectual friends: Olga had noticed long ago that he rarely talked about literature to her and as an earnest, educated, half-German Russian, she felt that he believed her not to be up to it and that he evaded the subject with his usual jokes. The cure was supposed to last two months, but at the end of a month he decided to go back with Olga to his house in Yalta, where his mother and sister were, as usual, staying for the summer. For the women the situation was difficult. Who had the natural right to rule, the wife or the sister? In the past Masha had taken charge of looking after Chekhov’s diet and health, had seen that he washed his hair and brushed his clothes and that he changed his ties. Although Masha’s jealousy of her friend had faded, it revived when she heard Olga say she was thinking of giving up the theater and becoming a teacher in order to look after her husband.
Before the marriage Chekhov had made his will. Masha was to have his house “during her lifetime and the income from my dramatic productions.” To his wife he left one of his Crimean cottages. Decent sums were left to his brothers. After his mother’s and Masha’s deaths what remained, except the income from the plays, was to go to the Taganrog administration for public education. He clearly felt that the young Olga would be in far less need because of her now successful career.
Olga returned to Moscow, and he was soon bored and longing for her. He joined her briefly to see a performance of The Seagull in its new season and was at last delighted by it. They saw very little of each other because her rehearsals went on for hours, even into the night. She loved late parties, she could sing well, was a good pianist and, naturally, a good linguist, and she did not hide her excitement at being the wife of “the Russian Maupassant.” But he could not keep up with her energetic life in Moscow. He and Masha would wait for her to return, often after midnight, from rehearsals or sprees, in the new large flat he and Olga had taken. Not surprisingly Chekhov’s illness returned and he had to go back to Yalta once more alone, but it was clear that his sister had now accepted the situation and, although still watchful, was calmer.
The story of Chekhov’s happy marriage to Olga is plain in the letters they wrote almost every day in their absences. Then in June 1902 comes their tragedy. She is pregnant, at first without knowing it; then she tells him and he is full of joy. They talk about their “little half German.” He longs for a son and he tries to stop her going to all those exciting parties that last half the night. He has heard of them from her but also from his worried sister. Olga miscarries: her hope of having a “little half German” has gone.
For a time Olga talks of giving up the theater so that they can spend all their time together, but Chekhov will not hear of it. It occurs to her that he says this because he would be bored in her continuous company. She has a sudden attack of peritonitis and Chekhov is patiently nursing her in a villa outside Moscow.
When he saw she was recovering he abruptly went off on a long journey to Perm with a millionaire mill-owner, Mo-rozov, who regarded himself as a revolutionary of sorts. Olga was hurt that he did not invite her to join them. The journey was not the last fling of the restless nomad.
Chapter Seventeen
The young novelist Bunin had long talks with Chekhov at Yalta and later wrote the best portrait we have of him in these last years. He saw the wasted body, the strangely darkened face, and noticed how, when he took off his pince-nez, he looked younger. He noticed how he lisped on some syllables when he talked and how he would suddenly flash with excitement, but more often spoke tonelessly, yet said the most bizarre things without a smile and loved a fantastic image. (He spoke of a boring, nonstop talker who was Tolstoy’s emissary, as being like “a funeral cart standing up on end.”) One evening Chekhov was walking with Bunin to his lodgings up a dark street and he saw a lighted window and said: “Did you hear that Bunin had been murdered there by a Tatar?” Another time Chekhov spoke of his own death and said that in seven years he would be forgotten and that people would say, “A good writer, but not as good as Turgenev,” a line that came from Trigorin in The Seagull.
At this period he was working on two stories: one, The Bishop, is one of his finest works and reads like a sustained anthem to his own death. The other is The Bride, sometimes called The Betrothed or The Fiancee. These are his last stories, written while he was working on his two great plays The Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. The Bishop returns to his early manner in The Artist and The Student, to his delight in the chants and ceremonies of the Orthodox Church, his love of the naivete of its deacons, the drollery of the “chaff and grain” in their pious lives.
The bishop, like Chekhov, has risen to fame from humble peasant origins, and at the end of his life he finds he is no longer regarded as an ordinary human being. The awe he inspires leaves him isolated: fame and rank have turned him into an institution. Now he is concerned with the rediscovery of his human self. There is something dreamlike yet totally exact in the marvelous opening pages, something plain yet melodiously Proustian in the glide from the particular to its associations. We see the bishop standing near the altar on the Eve of Palm Sunday, looking at a vast congregation:
When they began distributing the palm it was close upon ten o’clock, the candles were burning dimly, the wicks wanted snuffing; it was all in a sort of mist. In the twilight of the church the crowd seemed heaving like the sea, and to Bishop Pyotr, who had been unwell for the last three days, it seemed that all the faces—old and young, men’s and women’s—were alike, that everyone who came up for the palm had the same expression in his eyes. In the mist he could not see the doors [of the cathedral]; the crowd kept moving and looked as though there were no end to it. The female choir was singing, a nun was reading the prayers for the day. How stifling, how hot it was!