By the time the letter arrived, however, it was too late. Despite avowals that he had lost his faith, Chekhov was unwilling to follow the route proposed by his sister and cohabit as his elder brother had done. All the same, he did not want to attract attention to the fact that he was getting married, so there was no reception or party after the service. There were no guests, just the four statutory witnesses, and Chekhov informed his mother of the event by telegram on the day itself. The honeymoon was a health cure undertaken, on the recommendation of a doctor in Moscow, in a remote sanatorium :n Aksyonovo, in the foothills of the Ural mountains,' where the prescribed treatment was large doses of fermented mare's milk. Meanwhile, with numerous papers publicizing the news as it leaked out and also printing portraits of the happy couple,10 the hopes of numerous young women were crushed. Masha's painter friend Maria Drozdova wrote Chekhov an impassioned letter:
Dear, beloved Anton Pavlovich,
Goodness me, I was so disappointed by the news of your marriage. I was doing an oil pa. ntmg at the time and my brushes and my palette went all over the place. I hadn't completely given up hope of marrying you, you know! I kept thinking that it was nothing serious with all the others, and that God would reward me for my modesty, but now my hopes have been dashed. How I hate Olga Leonardovna now! My jealousy has reached a state of frenzy. I cannot stomach seeing your dear, kind face, it's become so odious to me, and the thought of you and her together, for ever and ever, is just awful! The doors of your house are shut for me now. Oh, I am so unhappy! I am sobbing as I write these lines .. .n
Drozdova had been happy to meet Olga before, and written to Chekhov to tell him how much she had admired her black eyes, her slim figure and even her elegant little moustache, but that Chekhov had married her was insupportable.
Chekhov and Olga spent just over five weeks at the sanatorium in Aksyonovo before travelling together to Yalta. Six weeks later, in late August, Olga returned to Moscow to begin rehearsals for the next theatre season, and a month after that, Chekhov jcmed her. Nine months after its premiere, he finally saw Three Sisters for the first time. His presence in the theatre was electrifying for the actors performing before him, and when it became known to the audience as well, there were clamours tor him to take a bow. He reluctantly appeared on stage at the end of the second act, to be greeted by a tumultuous ovation which was repeated at the end of the performance. Chekhov was pleased with the staging, and ioked that it was better than the play. He stayed in Moscow for six weeks, but eventually, at the end of October, had to leave his weeping wife and return alone to Yalta. 'My wife, who I have got used to and grown attached to, will stay ' i Moscow on her own, and I am leaving and feeling lonely,' he wrote to a friend on the eve of his departure; 'she is crying, but I am not allowing her to give up the theatre. It's a mess, really.'12
After the happy summer spent at Bogimovo in 1891, Chekhov never rented another dacha: there was no need once he was living in the country all year round at Melikhovo. In his last two summers, however, he briefly became a dachnik again when he was invited to stay at the country properties owned by two friends from wealthy merchant backgrounds: Stanislavsky and Maria Yakunchikova. The invitation to stay in Stanislavsky's dacha at Lyubimovka came about because of Olga's illness in the summer of 1902: she had contracted peritonitis after an operation for a probable ectopic pregnancy. All this happened at the end of March dur ng a Moscow Art Theatre tour to St Petersburg, and, although it was not openly discussed, Chekhov suspected with some justification that his wife was not pregnant by him.13 He nursed Olga for two and half months, first in Yalta, then in Moscow, but by mid-June needed to escape for a few weeks. It had been wearing having to be at Olga's bedside all day, with occasional visits to see a very skilful juggler perform providing the only respite. Quite apart from the fact that he was not terribly well himself, Chekhov was simply not used to living with his wife.
Leaving Olga in the care of her German doctor, Chekhov accepted an invitation to travel some 800 miles east to the Urals, to visit the factory and estate of the great merchant patron Sawa Morozov, the millionaire who underwrote the Moscow Art Theatre. It was not a particularly enjoyable trip, but the six weeks he spent with Olga at Lyubimovka on his return were invigorating for both of them. Stanislavsky's dacha, to the north-east of Moscow, was an attractive two-storey wooden villa with a spacious veranda, and stood next to a pine wood. In keeping with merchant style, the furniture was solid, comfortable and modest, and Chekhov felt very much at home.14 What he delighted in most, though, was being able to fish in the deep waters of the River Klyazma while Olga recuperated. He had not spent a summer like this in ages, he told Stanislavsky: 'I fish every day, about five times a day, it's not been bad (yesterday there was fish soup from the ruff I caught;, and I can't tell you how pleasant it is Sitting on the river bank.'15 Sitting with his fishing rod all da у was liberty compared with Yalta, he wrote to his lister, and he gloried in the long grass and leafy trees, wt 'ch could not be found anywhere in the Crimea.16
Chekhov mulled over ideas for The Cherry Orchard whne he was staying at Lyubiftiovjca (where there was, in fact, a cherry orchard), and Stanislavsky's old retainers and the English governess next door partly inspired some of the play's characters.17 In mid-August, Chekhov returned to Yalta; when he came back for another six week stay in Moscow a month later, he went for the fi -st time to the Moscow Art Theatre's new building on Kamergerskv Lane, right in the centre of the city. With a 300,000 rouble nvestment from Sawa Morozov, and leaving the fagade largely unchanged, Franz Shekhtel had designed an austere Art Nouveau interior, whose simplicity well suited the aesthetic of Cheknov's untheatr'cal drama. The Cherry Orchard would be the first of his plays to be prem .ered there.
In 1903, during the summer months Chekhov spent in Moscow, he
The new Moscow Art Theatre building, designed by Fyodor Shekhtel, 1902
stayed for a few weeks in a Flugel on an estate which belonged to the artist Maria Yakunchikova, a niece of the railway tycoon and patron of the arts, Savva Marnontov. Nara was situated on the railway line running south-east from Moscow, and was an attractive location: there was a river with plenty of fish, lots of places to go for walks and an old chapel. Chekhov enjoyed the lovely weather, the blossom, and the birds singing in the garden; he even managed to do some work on The Cherry Orchard, sitting by the large window of the house.18 The only down side seemed to be that the fish were not bin lg. He had still not caught even a tiddler after a week,19 and lamented not having anyone to fish with.20 Following the advice of Prof. Ostroumov, who now thought the climate in Yalta might not be ideal for Chekhov after all and was recommending that he spend his winters at a dacha outside Moscow, Chekhov also made two short trips with his wife to Zvenigorod and Voskresensk that summer to look at possible properties. He was delighted to have an excuse to stay up north, and immediately thought of buying a house in the area where he had enjoyed such happy times as a young man. In Voskresensk there were old friends to meet up with, and in Zvenigorod he visited the grave of the doctor he had replaced in 1884.21 He wrote to tell Masha about the wonderful bells he had heard at St Savva's, and how lovely it was, but just too dusty and hot.22 Although there was one charming property on the river bank behind the town church in Voskresensk, wh ch would have suited his mother, the asking price was too high, and Chekhov returned to Yalta in July 1903 without having bought anything.