Chekhov with his dogs Schnap and Sharik, 1904
in the same year that Chekhov died). Kashtanka got fatter and was always asleep, Sharik felt that he was somehow a lower-class meshchanin kind of dog and so was rather timid about wagging his tail. The dogs seemed to have a pretty good life at the White Dacha all in all. Chekhov's Yalta doctor, Isaak Altschuller, felt the hours his patient spent in his garden surrounded by his dogs were among the happiest in his life.6 'Sobaka' - dog - and its many variations (Sobachka, Sobachonka, Pyos, Pyosvk, even Fomka) was one of Chekhov's favourite terms of endearment for Olga. Sometimes he even wrote to her as though she were a dog, telling her he wanted to take her by the tail and wag it and stroke her fur gently. 'I love you and will love you even if you turn from a dog into a crocodile,' he once joked.7
The major event in the spring of 1900 was the Moscow Art Theatre's tour of the Crimea at Easter, a majur undertaking in those days. Olga arrived a few days early with Masha, and then joined her colleagues in Sevastopol for the first performances. It was here that Chekhov saw Uncle Vanya for the first time - and it was also the first time he had seen the company perform before an audience. He also attended performances of Hauptmann's Lonely People and Ibsen's Hedda Gabler before his 11-health forced him back home to Yalta. Then followed ten heady days over Easter when the company took up residence in Yalta's brand new theatre. The dacha was suddenly full of noisy actors, directors and writers, and it was a bit of a shock for Chekhov now to have convivial lunches every day and stay up all hours after his long, boring wmter, but it was clear to his sister that he thrived on the stimulating company. The Yalta Theatre had opened in 1896 and was home to an operetta company, but never played to full houses. Suddenly it was packed, and Chekhov was forced to endure ovation after ovation. Two days before the Moscow Art Theatre left, members of the company held a literary evening at the theatre whose proceeds were donated to the charity that cared for people with tuberculosis and other invalids who had travelled to Yalta without means of support. As well as extracts from Sophocles, Maria Andreyeva, the beautiful young actress playng Nina in The Seagull, read Chekhov's touching early story 'Vanka'. It had been a great favourite with his fans ever since its publication on Christmas Day 1886, and was one of his very best works according to Tolstoy (who, conversely, had not long before gone to see Uncle Vanya and found it exasperating). The orphaned young Vanka (short for Ivan) has been sent from his village in the countryside to become an apprentice shoemaker in Moscow. He is treated so badly by his employers and the other apprentices, and is so lonely, that on Christmas Eve he writes a letter to his grandfather, the only family he has left, begging h n to come and take him away. But it takes Vanka a long time to write the letter because he keeps being distracted by thoughts of home:
Vanka trembled as he sighed and then again started staring at the window. He remembered that it was his grandfather who always went into the woods to get the master's Christmas tree and would take him along too. It was such fun! His grandfather would crackle, and the frost would crackle and Vanka would crackle too as he looked at them. His grandfather would smoke his pipe and stand there sniffing his tobacco for ages before he cut the tree down, laughing at frozen-stiff little Vanyushka... The young fir trees, all wrapped in frost, would stand without moving, wondering which one of them would have to die. And then all of a suddden a hare would shoot like an arrow over the snowdrifts .. .8
The nine-year-old Vanka thinks it is enough to address his letter to 'grandfather in the village' and put it in the nearest postbox for it to reach him. The twenty-six-year-old Chekhov had already mastered the art of ending his works on a tragi-comic note. Constant calls for the author to take а-bow"had induced Chekhov to escape early from most of the performances during the Moscow Art Theatre's tour to Yalta in 1900, but he stayed to hear all the readings on this particular evening Six months later the theatre burned down.
II
Pushkin, the Old Oak of Taganrog, and Three Sisters
Masha: A green oak by the curving shore, and on that oak a golden chain...
Three Sisters, Act 1
Chekhov began the twentieth century thinking about Alexander Pushkin. This was not only because he received news on 17 January 1900 (1 .s birthday) that the august Academy of Sciences had elected him to the new belles-lettres section it had recently inaugurated to mark the centenary of Pushkin's birth. To old Maryushka this meant Chekhov was now a 'general', but to him it was about the same as being made an honorary citizen of a small provincial town. He knew the staid Imperial Academy would never tolerate writers with any kind of a social conscience having an active say in its affairs, still less writers who actually lived in St Petersburg and could ask the distinguished professors difficult questions at meetings.9 It was not for nothing that his appointment was only honorary.' tie Academy's president, after all, was the poet K.R., otherwise the Grand Duke Konstantin Romanov (it was his father who had built the church at Oreanda). That Chekhov and the
Grand Duke had shared a friend in Tchaikovsky made no difference and when Gorky's appointment was barred because of his subversive political activities two years later, Chekhov resigned The rebellious Pushkin, the new section's bonorand, would no doubt have looked on the affair with the same mixture of ironic detachment and disdain.
Chekhov had been thinking about Pushkin quite a lot lately. He had been an active member of the committee which had planned events to celebrate the centenary, in 1899, of the poet's birth in Yalta, but at the beginning of the new century he was thinking more about Pushkin in connection with the time the poet had spent in the Crimea in 1820. What interested him was that Pushkin was another Russian wr ter who had been exiled to the south, and who longed to return to his metropolitan literary life. On 15 January 1900, Chekhov wrote to his sister to tell her that he had bought a piece of the Crimean coast in the idyllic village of Gurzuf. It came with a secluded house located at the end of a path and the famous Pushkin Rock which stuck out of the sea in its own little bay. Chekhov had come to the conclusion that Kuchuk- koy was a little too far away, and a little too inconvenient for bathing (it was later sold), and he was hankering for a dacha closer to home that would be right on the sea.10 Also, he needed to be able to escape from the endless stream of visitors who wore him down at his house in Yalta. Here he was successful, for almost no one ever found out about his new house. Part of Chekhov's motivation must have come from wanting to find somewhere he could be alone with Olga when she came down to stay; they had been exchanging increasingly affectionate letters for six months now, and it was not easy living under the watchful eye of his mother and sister, even though he had taken care when designing the White Dacha to ensure that the rooms would be well separated from each other. In November 1899, the month that he began thinking about Three Sisters for the first time,11 Chekhov heard about a property that had come up for sale in Gurzuf, which was only about nine miles away from Yalta. Gurzuf boasted some of the most enchanting scenery along the coast, and the original Tatar village of whitewashed cottages, dominated by an enormous mosque (later destroyed in the earthquake of 1927), had already begun to give way to churches and smart Russian villas. The increasing exclusivity of the resort was reflected ;n the high price being asked by the vendor.