Pushkin's famous lines about the green oak tree by the seashore are symbolically invoked by Masha three times in the course of the play. The last occasion they are uttered comes when she has finally parted with Vershinin at the very end of the last act. Spring has given way to autumn, and the mood is one of loss as the three sisters must finally abandon the hopes and dreams they have cherished and confront the painful reality of their situation. 'Farewell trees!' exclaims Second Lieutenant Rode, ,at the beginning of the last act. Just before his pointless death, Tuzenbakh becomes conscious of how potentially beautiful human life can be by perceiving the beauty of the trees in the Prozorovs' garden for the first time - the same fir trees, maples and birches which the destructive Natasha moments later peremptorily decides should be chopped down. As in Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orchard and many of his short stories, trees are a favourite symbol of life and eternal renewal for Chekhov. 'In Yalta spring is already in full flood, all the trees are in blossom, although many have already stopped blossoming (including me),' he wrote to an acquaintance in March 1901,16 during another bout of tree plam ng in his Yalta garden, perhaps thinking back to Tuzenbakh's identifica on with a dead tree swaying along with others in the wind.
Having written his last play about an enterprising young merchant who buys a beautiful old cherry orchard and then proceeds to chop down the trees with a view to future profits, Chekhov would no doubt have appreciated the irony of the destiny allotted to the charred stump of the 'Pushkin oak' by the modern-day Lopakhins of Taganrog who wish to raise it literally from the dead, but with no thought of making money from the enterprise. When the Taganrog Union of Businessmen declared its intention to pay scientists to clone the famous tree, believing it had a duty to protect its country's heritage, even the international media took an interest.17 Funding this unusual project was not going to be a problem: it was in Taganrog, after all, that the first legal Russian millionaire was registered, Alexander Roginsky, the Rostov University botanist who visited Taganrog in June 2002, verified chat the mulberry tree was ndeed old enough to have inspired Pushkin, and declared that its remains contained enough living tissue for the tree to be reproduced using the latest cloning technology Leonid
Matusevich, head of the Taganrog Union of Businessmen, and also a local government representative, told an hvestiya correspondent that measures would be taken to protect the historic area in the Tsar's former garden (now otherwise asphalted over) from any kind of commercial enterprise18 and later told the BBC that the tree's reappearance would herald a spiritual revival across the whole of Russia.19 One wonders whether Chekhov's most famous scourge of Russia's deforestation, Dr Astrov, would have laughed or applauded.
The lonely mulberry .n Chekhov's miniature walled garden at Gurzuf was soon joined by a fig tree, a palm, a cypress, and a bamboo - which came in very useful for making fishing rods. Chekhov brought Olga to Gurzuf when she came to stay in July 1900, and they spent many happy hours in quiet seclusion on their private beach, sometimes seeing dolphins in the bay. Olga went swimming and Chekhov sat on the rocks, fishing for mackerel and grey mullet, and perhaps also thinking about Three Sisters. As soon as Olga returned to Moscow (by which time they had become intimate and abandoned the formal manner of address with each other) he returned to work on the first act of the play at the new dacha, sitting at his desk in front of the window overlooking the sea. The yearning for Moscow, which pervades Three Sisters, reflects Chekhov's own yearning to be near his favourite actress. 'I'm dying for you to give me word that I can pack my bags and come to Moscow,' he wrote to her after they were married, but still living separate lives. 'Moscow, Moscow! These words are the refrain not of Three Sisters but One Husband!'20
Three Sisters was the first play Chekhov wrote with a particular company and even particular actors in mind. He created the character of Masha, the best part in the play, specifically for Olga. 'Oh, what a role there is for you in Three SistersV he wrote to her that autumn. 'What a role! If you give me ten roubles you can have it, otherwise I will give it to another actress.'21 Masha was the Chekhovian character with whom Olga became indelibly associated, and the one she most strongly identified with. It became her signature role, and the quotation of Pushkin's verse about the oak tree by the shore her most famous lines. Thus, at the celebration held at the Moscow Art Theatre to honour her ninetieth birthday in October 1958, when some actors dressed in old-fashioned military uniform appeared on stage and one of them started acting Fedotik's part in Three Sisters as he presented her with a gift, Olga immediately followed the cue w ith the next lines in the script: 'A green oak by the curving shore, and on that oak a golden chain.. .' fhey
were the last lines she spoke in the theatre,
Щ
The Actress and the Bishop
I am so bored without you that I feel that I have been shut up in a monastery.
Letter to Olga Knipper, 31 August 1901
The Moscow Art Theatre residency in the spring of 1900 was a high poinc for Chekhov during the lonely Yalta years, as were the visits from Olga, who became his wife the following year. But in between were the long months of boredom and increasing ill-health. Chekhov had taken a particular pride in cultivating roses in his Yalta garden, since they were flowers he particularly loved. He planted by hand a hundred of what he called the most noble and cultured sort just after moving into his house in 1899, and there were soon fifty-seven varieties blooming among the peonies, which had been carefully uprooted from Melikhovo and brought down to Yalta. Each plant was entered into his gardening notebook, in Latin and in Russian. Then, in February 1902, Chekhov discovered that when he bent down to prune his roses he was soon out of breath and had to take a rest after each bush. This was a terrifying reminder of his frail condition, which was now beginning seriously to deteriorate. In truth, he had been so unwell in recent months that he had not been down to the centre of town for weeks. Coughing up blood every morning had confined him to bed, where he lay reading the vast numbers of newspapers he subscribed to.23
The situation was made worse by the unceasing interest shown in the state of his health by the very newspapers he so depended on. It was as if he was living in a goldfish bowl in Yalta. The minute he had arrived in the resort, reports about his health had appeared in the national press and the thought of such stories reaching his mother caused him a great deal of stress. The St Petersburg News and Stock Exchange Paper, for example, printed the following on 25 October 1898: 'The health of the writer Chekhov, who has settled in Yalta, has worsened; he has a constant cough, his temperature is fluctuating and he is spitting blood intermittently.' Chekhov was mortified, and immediately wrote to his brother Ivan: