The monks' singing that evening was harmonious and inspired; there was a young monk with a black beard leading the service; and as he heard about the bridegroom who cometh at midnight, and about the bridal chamber being adorned, the bishop did not feel repentance for his sins, or sorrow, but a spiritual calm, a quietness, and he was carried away by thoughts of the distant past, of his childhood and youth, when they hadalso sung about the bridegroom and the mansion, and now that past seemed vivid, beautiful and joyful, as it had probably never been. And maybe in our next bte we will remember the distant past and our life here on earth with the same feeling. Who knows! The bishop was sitting by the altar where it was dark. Tears were running down his face. He was thinking that he had achieved everything possible for a man in his position, and he had faith, but still not everything was clear to him, something was missing, he did not want to die; it seemed to him that he was still m;ssing something really nportant, something wLch he had dreamed about vaguely once long ago, and that same hope about the future stirred him now, as it had during his ch ldhood, whi e he was at the academy and when he had been abroad.31
Chekhov's house in Autka, 1901
A few weeks after first setang eyes on Olga, and j.ist before moving down to the Crimea in the autumn of 1898, Chekhov had given his younger brother JVHsha a lecture about marriage, telling him it was only ever worth marrying for love. 'Marrying a girl just because she is nice is the same as buying something you don't need in the bazaar just because it's pretty,' he wrote. 'In family life the most important element is love, sexual attraction, one flesh; everything else is just pointless andboring, however cleverly we might pontificate about it.'*2 There was no question in Chejchov's mind as to why he married Olga. He was to write her hundreds of tender letters during the five years of their relationsh ф SomeL Ties the letters were ardent, as at the end of October 1901:
My darl .ig, angel, my dog, dear friend, I beg you, believe me, I love you, love you deeply; don't forget me, write and think about me more often. Whatever might happen, even if you suddenly turn . nto an old woman,
I will st 1 love yotr - for your soul and your good spirit. Write to me,
* t
little hound! Take good care of your health. If you fall ill, then come to Yalta and I will look after you. Don't wear yourself out my child .. . May God bless you. Don't forget me, I am your husband after all. I send you much, much love, hugs and more love. My bed seems lonely to me, as if I was a miserly, wi :ked old bachelor. Write!!
Your Antoine
Don't forget that I am your husband, write to me every day. Greetings to Masha. I am still eat'ng the sweets your Mama gave me. Greetings to her too.33
And sometimes, despite his feeling completely wretched, Chekhov's letters were playful, as at the end of January 1902, just when he was putting the finishing touches to 'The Bishop'. Alluding to Olga's German origins, he wrote:
And so, my wonderful, good, golden wife, may God preserve you, be healthy, be happy, remember your husband at least at night time when you are going to bed. The main thing is don't be down. Your husband is not a drunkard after all, nor a clod or a ruffian, but a totally German husband in his habits; I even wear warm underwear ... I embrace you a hundred and one times, and kiss my wife endlessly.
Your Antoine34
The sombre mood of 'The Bishop' is also infused with Chekhov's love for his mother, with whom he had lived almost his entire life and to whom he was very close. Bishop Pyotr's self-effacing mother unexpectedly comes to visit him in the story:
It was so stuffy, and so hot! Vespers had been going on for such a long time now! Bishop Pyotr was tired. His breathing was heavy and rapid, his mouth was dry, his shoulders ached with tiredness and his legs were shaking. And it was upsetting that there was a holy fool crying out occasionally from the gallery. And then suddenly, as if in a dream or a delirium, it seemed to His Reverence that his own mother Mariya "imofeyevna, whom he had not seen for n le years now, or an old woman who looked like Ls mother, had come up to him in the crowd and taken a branch of pussy willow from him, and then walked away, still beaming at him with a warm, joyful smile until she merged back into the crowd. Tears for some reason started pouring down I s face. He was at peace in his heart, everything was fine, but he had his gaze fixed on the left cleros where the reading was tak ng place, and where you could no longer make out anyone in the evening darkness - and was crying. Tears glistened on his face and on his beard. Then someone near to him started crying, and another person further away as well, then more and more people started crying, until the whole church was full of quiet weeping. But after a little while, about five minutes later, the convent choir was singing, people had stopped crying and everything was as it had been before.35
Like Bishop Pyotr's mother, Evgenia Yakovlevna was a gentle, devout woman with little education but a kind and generous spirit. Having lived through the death of one son from tuberculosis, the state of her son Anton's health was her prime concern. Chekhov wrote to her punct;,lously whenever they were apart - short, simple letters in which he never abandoned the formal form of address. She wrote back ungrammatical letters without much punctuation, usually in pencil, on whatever piece of paper she could find. Since Chekhov did not consider her large archaic-look ing script suitable for the mail, he prepared cards for her to send to him while he was away, ready addressed to Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Yalta'.36
Chekhov finished his story during the bleak early weeks of Lent in 1902, when not only his mother but also old Maryushka, the cook, the maid and the gardener were all fasting. In an odd kind of way, The Bishop' is also a veiled tribute to Chekhov's father, whose excessive piety may have caused his son to demur from attending church in adulthood, but left him nevertheless with a profound knowledge of the scriptures (which he certainly felt enriched by) and an interest in religious writing: Pavel Egorovich's spiritual books were all kept on the Yalta bookshelves. He had also left his son wink a deep respect for people who had strong fauh, religious or otherwise. Chekhov had known and been fr mdly with many priests and bishops during his life, and drew from that deep well of experience when creating the character of Bishop Pyotr. There was his contemporary Bishop Sergy, for example, who the Chekhov family had got to know back in the 1880s when he was a history student at Moscow University. He was made a bishop. in P899,37 and exchanged several warm letters with Chekhov "while he was living in Yalta. According to his friend Father Sergei Shchukm, who taught in the Yalta parish school, Chekhov also was inspired by a photograph he stumbled on in Yalta of Mikhail, Bishop of the Cr'mea, who had just died prematurely of tuberculosis. The photograph depicted him sitting with his head leaning sadly towards his old mother, who looked as it she was the widow of a village deacon, who had come to visit her son from deepest Tambov. Like the bishop in Chekhov's story, Bishop Mikhail had served abroad and had become known in clerical circles for founding a new kind of scholarly monasticism. Among the religious works Chekhov read during these years was Bishop Mikhail's book on the Gospel.38
Recalling an earlier conversation, the ailing, housebound Chekhov told Olga in September 1901 that he did indeed long to be able to go roaming round the world with just a knapsack on his back, 'breathing freely and wanting nothing'.39 How poignant then that ;ust before the lonely Bishop Pyotr dies in Chekhov's story, he has a vision of himself doing precisely that: