The role of Irina in The Sea Gull was played by Olga Knipper. Chekhov met the actress at a rehearsal. Within less than three years, on May 25, 1901, they were married. He was then forty-one and his bride thirty-one. They spent their honeymoon in a sanatorium.
Some years earlier when Suvorin had been urging him to marry, Chekhov had declared: "Very well, I'll get married, if you wish. But my conditions are: every- thing must remain just as before, that is, she must live in Moscow and I in the country, and I'll go to see her. Happiness continuing day after day, from morning to morning, I shan't be able to stand.. . . I promise to be a splendid husband, but give me a wife who, like the moon, will not appear in my sky every day." He found precisely such a wife. To keep her engagements, she had to winter in the two capitals. His illness tied him to his southern place of exile. He went to see her in Moscow, occasionally she visited him at Yalta, or they would have a few weeks together elsewhere. They exchanged letters almost daily. Writing to her, before their marriage, of the fate that kept them apart, he said that neither of them was to blame: "It's the devil who has put the bacillus in me and the love of art in you." After they were married, he assured her that she need feel no pricking of conscience if she could not be at his side, that he didn't feel cheated, that all was going well with them, and that they were indeed a model couple, since they didn't interfere with one another's work. The arrangement, however, had its drawbacks. He missed her more than he had imagined possible. Separation was not a matter of choice: it was enforced by his ill health. On that account he was not with her when she had a miscarriage; she promised him a son the follow- ing year, but they were never to have the child that both longed for. There was something pathetic about this union, for all the insistent gaiety that marked his resigned acceptance of the situation.
The year before his marriage Chekhov was elected honorary member of the newly created Section of Belles Lettres in the National Academy of Sciences. He was at this time the most outstanding literary figure in Russia, next to Tolstoy. He did not long wear the academic laurels, however. In 1902 Maxim Gorky was accorded the same honor, but as he was then under indictment for a political offense, the authorities succeeded in hav- ing the election annulled. Thereupon Chekhov resigned from the august body. Though his protest was not a public one, the gesture was significant for a man of his temper. He had long since abandoned any attachment to the ideas that Suvorin championed in his paper. For at least a decade Chekhov's public—and that meant all literate Russia—had been taking it for granted that he belonged in the liberal camp. He still had no patience with cut-and-dried ideologies, owed no allegiance to any political group, nor did he show any leanings to- ward socialism. On occasion he could bracket "sulky- faced Marxists" with police inspectors. But he was now definitely with those who looked forward to the speedy do^fall of the autocratic regime. What cropped up in the writings of his last years was something above and beyond millennial hopes: a dissatisfaction with quietism, a welcoming of the violent change that he saw on the way. At twenty-eight he had asserted that there would never be a revolution in Russia. At forty he believed ^fferently. The country, he felt, was emerging from its torpor and beginning, as he put it, "to hum like a bee- hive." He wanted to catch this new mood of wakening energies. Indeed, in his last story, "Betrothed," a girl breaks away from her confining home environment and goes out into the world, and it has been stated that in the first draft Nadya, the heroine, joins the revolution- ists. Chekhov also spoke of wanting to write "a buoyant play." He did not write it. His last play, The Cherry Orchard, first staged the year before the upheaval of 1905, tolled the knell of old Russia rather than rang in the new. Nor did he witness its aborted start.
What with his trips north and the excitement attend- ant upon the production of his plays, his mode of living was scarcely what the doctor ordered. After he was married, he grew rapidly worse. The first night of The Cherry Orchard was set for January 17, 1904, the play- wright's forty-fourth birthday. His friends turned the evening into a celebration of the twenty-fifth anniver- sary of his literary activity, although he had actually broken into print in 1880, twenty-four years previously. Shaken with coughing, Chekhov was hardly able to stand up to receive the ovation and listen to the ad- dresses. He was criticaUy ill that spring and yet, with the war against Japan in progress, he talked of going to the front as an doctor. In June he was rushed to a health resort in the Black Forest and there, on July 2, he died. His body was taken to Moscow in a refrigerating car for the transportation of oysters. The last trick that Fate played on ^rn was of the sort that it would have amused him to jot do^ in his notebook.
Toward the end of his life Chekhov remarked to a friend that people would stop reading ^rn a year after his death. As a matter of fact, his vogue kept growing steadily until the cataclysm of 1917 and his position as the major figure of the Silver Age of Russian literature was becoming increasingly secure. During the harsh, strenuous revolutionary years his reputation suffered a partial eclipse, but by now it has regained its former luster, and his work is valued not alone for its intrinsic quality but also for the light that it throws on a dead past. Just when his compatriots, coping with the tasks and hardships of the new order, were looking away from Chekhov, the western world, especially England and ^merica, was enthusiastically exploring ^rn as a remark- able discovery. Indeed, shortly after the First World War, the homage paid to him in certain literary circles verged on a cult. That first fine careless rapture has since died do^, and something closer to a just estimate of his significance can be arrived at.
As a playwright Chekhov made a virtue of his limita- tions and so brought something new into the theater. He lacked the dramatic instinct. His plays want the sense of crisis, the heightened tension, the clear-cut clash of wills that one expects on the stage. There is something loose and amorphous about them. Of the five full-sized pieces that he wrote, The Cherry Orchard alone comes near to answering the demands of the theater. It is also the play which has had the greatest box-office success. The supersession of the landed gen- try by the mercantile middle class, which is its theme, is obviously one with abundant dramatic possibilities. The auctioning off of Mme. Ranevskaya's ancestral estate affords a definite climax toward which the action rises and from which it declines. The more important char- acters are drawn in such a fashion as to offset one an- other, and there is a good deal of suspense, first as to the fate of the property, and second as to whether the new owner will propose to the daughter of the house.