I'm writing to you again, dearest Ivan. There was a telegram from Yalta on 24 October printed in The News maintaining that my health has worsened, that I am coughing all the time, spitting blood etc. It's all a complete lie, an idiotic fabrication which could upset our nearest and dearest. I promise you, my temperature is normal, I don't even have any reason to take my temperature, I am not coughing any more than usual and I have not coughed blood once in Yalta. If the Moscow papers reprint the telegram it will be really dreadful; imagine if our mother read it. I swear to you again that the telegram is lying . . ,24
The Petersburg newspaper had picked up a news tem in Odessa News the day before which spoke of Chekhov's worrying cough and blood- spitting, and then several other papers had run with it, including (unfortunately for Chekhov) the Moscow-based Russian News. A hack for a local Crimean newspaper in Simferopol went for the sensationalist angle by dressing the story up a little: 'There has been a significant deterioration in recent days in the health of the famous writer A. P. Chekhov, living in Yalta. He is tormented by a constant cough and sometimes there is blood-spitting. These ominous symptoms cause one to have serious fears for his life.' As it happens, the editor of Russian News just then received a letter Chekhov had sent earlier in which he professed to be in good health, so he swiftly published a retraction, as did the' local Yalta paper, the Crimean Courier, at Chekhov's speciLc request - but not before he had, by his own admission, spent five days panicking that his mother would find out and start worrying about him; he found it all extremely unpleasant.25
A few weeks later Chekhov actually met the editor of the Crimean Courier (yet another native of Taganrog), and arranged for the paper to be sent to Masha and Ivan in Moscow. Over the next few years, the Crimean Courier would publish Chekhov's various appeals for donations to charitable causes, including several to help peasant children during the famine which followed the failure of the harvest in
Samara in 1898. Thanks to a group of village school teachers, doctors, priests and members of rural sections of the Red Cross, Chekhov reported that over 412,000 meals had been provided for more than 3,000 children in the 1891 famine. As a result of the new appeals (each person's donation was listed in the newspaper individually, from Olya and Vera T's five kopecks to Mrs M.M.'s twenty-five roubles), Chekhov was later able to report that over 24,000 children would be saved from starvation following the 1898 harvest failure. He also wrote about the appalling situation of the impoverished consumptives who flocked to Yalta in the winter months, with nowhere to live and no one to turn to.26 Chekhov's name certainly helped both these causes. Meanwhile, the Crimean Courier's readers were really more :nterested in reading about him, and the paper seized every opportunity to write about its most famous resident. The paper already published the names of those visiting Yalta as a matter of course - it had announced Chekhov's arrival on 20 September 189827 - and it was quick to announce that he had disembarked from the steamer from Novorossiisk, together with Olga, in July 1899. Their marriage was front page news two years later, and the Courier continued to follow the writer's every move, even publicizing his departure for Moscow in May 1904 and his subsequent journey to Badenweiler the following month. Such was the pr :e of celebrity and Chekhov felt he had nowhere to hide. 'I'm fed up with the Courier,' he exclaimed in exasperation to Olga in August 1901, 'they write rubbish about me in almost every issue.'28
And so the notoriously reserved Chekhov was forced to endure the distasteful experience of watching the gradual extinguishing of his life being made public property, even as he took pains to minimize the seriousness of his condition to his family and, indeed, to himself. His health became noticeably worse in the autumn of 1901, right after his marriage, and not even the red blossom on his quince tree during the snowy days of February 1902 could distract him very long from thoughts of death. Ironically, this should have been a time of great personal happiness for Chekhov: he had recently married his beloved and, in so doing, had acquired the kind of part-time wife he had famously confided to Suvorin, back in 1895, was his ideaclass="underline"
All right, I'll get married if you want. But these are my conditions: everything must be as before, i.e., she has to live in Moscow and I'll live
Yalta, seen from the east
in the country, and I'll go and visit her. I couldn't take the sort of round the clock happiness which goes on day after day. I get vicious when people talk to me about the same thing every day in the same tone of voice ... I promise to be a wonderful husband, but give me a wife like the moon, who won't appear in my sky every day. NB: I won't start writing better if I am married.29
And yet the practicalities of marriage to a successful full-time actress in Moscow were not in the end very favourable to someone in Chekhov's tubercular condition. It is true that a man with his restless spirit found it hard to stay still in one place, but since moving to Yalta, where he was supposed to lead a quiet life, Chekhov had taken several trips to Moscow, had travelled to the Caucasus, and had gone all the way to France to spend a prolonged period in Nice. Olga heightened his desire to get away from Yalta even more, and the relationship was certainly beneficial in that it distracted him from his illness. 'Your letters are like medicine without which I can no longer exist,' he wrote to her in December 1901. But, conversely, the relationship probably also contributed to the advancement of his illness. There was the strain of being apart from Olga, and the strain of having to get used to be ig in each other's company again after their separations; and the Moscow Art Theatre productions of Chekhov's last four plays were also a source of intense emotional stress, following that disastrous first staging of The Seagull in 1896 in St Petersburg. The experience of seeing his plays staged well at last, and greeted with acclaim, ultimately brought Chekhov great happiness, but not before he had expended large amounts of nervous energy - the last thing someone in his delicate condition needed. Thus, in a way, Chekhov's last years became an example of the paradoxes of existence he had explored so masterfully in his fiction.
The potent mixture of love'and death which pervaded Chekhov's last years found perhaps its greatest artistic expression in his penultimate story 'The Bishop', which was completed in February 1902. It is one of his most finely wrought pieces of prose, a highly lyrical work which was completed at great emotional cost. Due to his poor health, it took Chekhov longer to write this story than any other. He had been musing on the subject for about fifteen years, but first began it in December 1899. Work on the story continued in fits and starts for the next two years. It is hard to find much that is overtly joyful m the account of the rapid escalation of Bishop Pyotr's illness, from his initial feelings of infirmity on Palm Sunday to Irs untimely death from typhoid less than a week later on Easter Saturday. The story is exquisitely sad, and Chekhov poured nto this sympathet' a charactei all his own feelings of loneliness, alienation and fear experienced during his Yalta exile, where he considered his lifestyle so ascetic that he took со signing his letters 'Antony the monk'.30 He too found his endless visitors debilitating; he too was weary of being treated w ith awe and reverence; he too longed for true companionship; he too could not but look back on his life with nostalgia as he confronted the prospect of it coming to its end; he too longed to get away from his provincial prison, and he also did not want to d'e. But the life-changing experience of love also filled his writing with a new warmth and a sense of peace: