The matching of time present and time past gives the play the density and intricacy of a novel; the play is the most novelized of Chekhov’s plays because the people talk it into existence and because no one listens. It is a farce because the people are a disordered chorus who have lost their gods and invent themselves. They are a collective farewell, and that is what moves us. As Professor Rayfield has written, the play is also Chekhov’s farewell to Russia and his genius.
There was the usual trouble, especially with Stanislavsky, but even with Nemirovich-Danchenko, when rehearsals began. The premiere was on January 17, 1904. Chekhov was too ill to go to it but he was taken, against his will, to see the end of the third act. The occasion was arranged as the celebration of his twenty-five years as a writer. Chekhov loathed celebrations and listening to speeches. A journalist wrote:
He stood in the middle of the stage, tall and haggard, stooping and fidgeting with his hands, in a short-tailed morning coat, rather short trousers, with dishevelled hair and gray beard. Someone in the gallery called out kindly, “Sit down,” but there was no chair on the stage.
He was with Olga and in February she described how on a sunny day, though the frost was hard, they took a trip by train into the country and came back by sleigh; he loved the white plains gleaming in the sun and the crunch of the runners on the smooth snow. The Russo-Japanese war had started and Chekhov was planning to go to the front as a doctor in June if he felt well enough.
“What is the meaning of life?” Olga asked in a letter when he was back in Yalta. He replied: “It is like asking what a carrot is. A carrot is a carrot and nothing more is known.”
In Yalta he lay in bed, emaciated, almost unrecognizable, and suffering great pain in his stomach, to which the disease had traveled. His doctor advised him to go to the German spa of Badenweiler in the Black Forest. It was plain that he would never return to Russia. This would be the nomad’s last trip. Olga traveled with him to Berlin; then on they went to the spa and they stayed in a guest house. The German doctors turned him upside down, he said, but the routine of treatment was “pleasant.” He was given an enormous amount of butter to eat. For a time his health improved, and by the middle of June he wrote to his sister—to whom he sent regular bulletins—that his weight was increasing, not by ounces but by pounds, and that he was able to go for walks in the sun. But Chekhov and Olga had to leave the guest house because the owners feared a death would drive away other guests. The couple moved to a cosy room at an hotel, and he would sit on the balcony watching the crowds going to the post office to collect letters. “That means everyone can read,” he wrote. “When will our peasants in Russia be like that? There is more talent in Russian villages: in Germany there is no talent but there is order and honesty.”
The doctor thought that Chekhov’s heart was bad, but that his lungs were strong enough to last for another four to six months. Chekhov was already talking of returning to Russia by way of Trieste and Lake Como, even of joining an expedition to the Arctic! But he clearly knew he would die much earlier for he sent a check to a Berlin bank and asked for the money to be made out to his wife’s name.
A few hours before he died, on July 2, 1904, Chekhov was telling Olga a story about an hotel packed with fat Englishmen and Americans who one evening discovered that the cook had left and there was no dinner. Olga was laughing at his account of how each of the guests reacted to this. A few hours later he was gasping for breath. They were going to send for oxygen but Chekhov said he would be dead before it came, so a bottle of champagne was brought. He sipped it and soon began to ramble and he evidently had one of those odd visions that he had evoked in Ward 6. “Has the sailor gone?” he asked. What sailor? Perhaps his sailor in Gusev? Then he said in Russian, “I am dying,” then in German, “Ich sterbe,” and died at once. Olga said his face suddenly looked very young, contented and “almost happy.” Very strangely, she had not expected him to die.
The journey back to Moscow and the funeral had elements of farce that would have delighted Chekhov; Gorky was infuriated. The coffin had been put into a goods wagon labeled Fresh Oysters, and in Moscow the mourners got mixed up with another funeral, that of a General Keller of Manchuria, to the sound of a military band. Part of the small crowd mourning for Chekhov followed the wrong procession, “That is how we treat our great writers,” Gorky wrote.
Chekhov was buried beside his father’s grave.
TO DOROTHY
This electronic edition published in 1988 by Bloomsbury Reader
Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP
Copyright © V. S. Pritchett, 1988
First published by Hodder and Stoughton 1988
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ISBN: 9781448200924
eISBN: 9781448202249
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