Chekhov : scenes from a life

Dearest and most remarkable actress, wonderful woman, if you only knew how pleased I was to receive your letter. I bow down low before you, very low - so low that my forehead ^;s touching the bottom of my well, which they have already dug to a depth of over fifty feet. I've got used to you and am missing you now, and I just cannot reconcile myself to the idea that I am not going to see you until Spring.⁶⁵

The autumn continued busy as Chekhov started sorting out the new house once his mother and sister had arrived. Old Maryushka Dormidontovna, who had been the family's cook since 1884, had travelled down from Moscow with them, and was installed in the little Flugel next to the house, containing a room for her and the kitchen. Chekhov had thoughtfully planted a bay tree outside the kitchen window. Maryushka was already 'n her seventies by th s time (nine years older than Chekhov's mother), and was living on in retirement as a member of the family, so Marfushka, a Cossack girl, was in daily taken on to help out w th cleaning and cooking.

Some precious items of furniture had arrived from Melikhovo, including the mahogany armoire that had been in the family since Taganrog days when Evgenia Yakovlevna used to keep sweets in it, out of view of her children. Chekhov was clearly remembering the reverent greetings they used to bestow on it as they walked past it when he came to wr te the first act of The Cherry Orchard, in which Gaev del vers a sentimental speech to the family cupboard. The armoire was placed in Chekhov's bedroom on the first floor, next to his study. T.ien there was the cherrywood dresser that Masha had designed, which had been made for the famny by some peasants .n Melikhovo. It was put next to the piano in the upstairs sitting room, where they took their meals while the ground floor of the house was being completed. The crystal glasses that had been part of Evgenia Yakovlevna's dowry made the journey, as did Pavel Egorovxh's walking sticks, religious books, and the accomplished pen and imc drawing he had completed of St John the Baptist, which Chekhov bung in his study. Before the trees started growing, the south-facing room, which became Chekhov's study, was filled with so much light that it had to be toned down with coloured glass in the window, shutters and dark wallpaper (specially ordered from Odessa). This room was very much the heart of the house, where Chekhov again surrounded himself with beloved objects: paintings of Russian rural scenes by Levitan as well as canvases by his brother Nikolai and other friends, a huge painted wooden bowl acquired one summer in Luka, the Egyptian-style inkwell and candlesticks he had bought in Venice, the miniature carved elephants he had brought back from Ceylon (which^also went on his desk), and many photographs of friends and contemporaries: Tolstoy, the actors at the Moscow Art Theatre, editors at the journals where he published.

Masha's bedroom up on the second floor of the house had been especially designed with lots of natural light so that she could paint in it. She would not settle permanently in Yalta until after Chekhov's death (she then lived in the large airy room for almost fifty years, until her death in 1957), but was to come for long visits in the school holidays. Evgenia Yakovlevna moved permanently to Yalta when they came down in the autumn of 1899, however, and settled, with the family icon and her needlework bags, into the room next door to her son. Her fnst impressions were positive, as Chekhov relayed to Ivan by letter: 'It's warm here, people don't swear at each other, you don't have to lock the doors, the house has turned out to be comfortaole, the bread is good, and cheap, and only the milk is a problem still - it's expensive and not very nice.' Chekhov was relieved that there was a church down the road from the house for his mother to go to, and a cab driver who lived nearby who could take her.⁶⁶ It was at the Greek Orthodox Church of St Theodore Tyron (the fourth-century martyr) that the first memorial service to be held for Cnekhov took place at eight in the ever.^:ng the day after he died.

Before Masha returned to Moscow at the end of October, Chekhov took her and their mother to see fr's dacha at Kuchuk-koy Once they had negotiated the terrifyingly steep track, they both liked it and looked forward to decamping to the seaside for the summer months. Chekhov wrote the day after Masha left to tell her that it had started raining, that he had dined alone with their mother, and that the Tatar builders had finally cleared away all the rubble left over from the construction. The Turkish carpenters were now no longer sleep ng on the ground floor of the house (where the Chekhovs would later have their dining room and two guest rooms), but they were still finishing oft the windows and the staircase, and there continued to be frequent calls to prayer. Chekhov also wondered if Masha had seen Kuchuk-коу from the deck of the ship as she was travelling round the coast to Sevastopol, and she replied that she had only just been able to make it out, because they had not sailed close to the coast.' ⁷

Unbeknownst to him, while Chekhov was writing that letter to his sister, the first night of Uncle Vanya at the Moscow Art Theatre was taking place. He had exchanged heartfelt telegrams with Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko a few weeks ear .er at the beginning of the the theatre's second season, but only found out the date of the Uncie Vanya premiere in a letter from Olga that arrived the following day. Later that evening he was woken up several times by the phone ringing, forcing him to get out of bed and pad barefoot across the cold floor to receive a series of congratulatory telegrams. It was the first time his own fame had prevented him from sleeping, he told Olga, and, of course, there were no telegrams the following night when he carefully put his dressing gown and slippers out by his bed in preparation. The cast had been very nervous on the first mght, and Chekhov ^: mmediately perceived that all had not gone quite as well as the telegrams implied. Masha had been able to read about the first nignt in the newspapers on the train before arriving in Moscow at the end of her long journey from Sevastopol, but then wrote a long letter to tell her brother all about the second performance, which had been much more successful. She told Chekhov about everything else she had been up to, and who ot their friends she had seen - she had lately become particularly close friends with her brother's inamorata, Olga Knipper. It was deeply frustrating and depressing for Chekhov be stuck m Yalta at times like this:

You write about the theatre, about the [literary] circle and all sorts of other temptations, and it's as f you are teasing me, as if you don't know how boring and how oppressive it is going to bed at nine in the evening, to go to bed in a bad mood, knowing there is nowhere to go, no one to calk to and nothing to work for, since whatever happens, you know you're not going to get to see or hear your work. The piano and I are two objects in the house which are leading a si'ent existence, and at a loss to understand why we were put here when there is no one here to play us.⁶⁸

It did not help that Uncle Vanya soon became a smash hit. Masha wrote that even Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich, the Governor of Moscow, and his wife had been to see it, and had apparently liked the play very much (but she had shrunk from being presented to them). Tickets for the run had completely sold out, and Masha had been handing out her visiting card tight, left and centre to friends to take to the theatre administration so that (in time-honoured Russian fashion) they could get in to see the play via the back door.⁶⁹

Chekhov tr ed sublimating his frustration by browsing through the catalogues of lmmer₄and Son, the Moscow horticultural firm. Ivan had sent hirriia hundred tulip and twenty-five narcissus bulbs, which had been promptly planted, as had ten cypress trees, and Mustafa had finished making all the garden paths. The next task was to put up a fence and some barbed w re between the garden and the Tatar cemetery. At this point Mustafa decided to leave, and was replaced by a quiet young man called A^rseny, who was not only Russian, but a devout Orthodox Christian who spent his free time reading the lives of samts. Th^;s probably came as a relief to Chekhov's pious mother, even if he was a little slow. Arseny had been employed at the Nikitsky Imperial Botanical Gardens, which were located next to Massandra, a few miles out of Yalta, and a place Chekhov was naturally very fond of (its botanists were appointed to look after his garden after his death). The Niidtsky Gardens had been foundeo in 1812, Among the thousands of species cultivated in its spacious grounds was the largest collection of vines in the world, which had been purchased by the Russian government from an American merchant in France and shipped all the way to the Crimea Over the course of the autumn, Chekhov continued to plant trees, shrubs and flowers in profusion fifty pyramidal acacias, a birch tree, a lemon tree, an orange tree, a peach tree, oleanders, camellias, lilies, roses, magnolias, and they were later joined by hyacinths, i-ises, rhododendrons, cedars, lilacs, marigolds, stocks, and dozens and dozens of other trees and flowers.⁷⁰ "he bare ground in front of the new house was soon filled with saplings and sprouting plants, and they clearly had an impact on Chekhov's creativity, for he had begun wri-ing again after almost a year of s^ence. He sent off 'The Lady with the Little Dog' at the end of October and immediately started work on 'In the Ravine' - a much longer, bleaker work, more n keeping with the mordant satirical tone of his earlier work.