I think The Three Sisters is a great play. It is a greater play than Uncle Vanya which, to me, is a greater play than The Cherry Orchard. But all three plays are of such importance that no easy and quick summary should be made of them.
It would be impossible here, and needless, since the letters speak for themselves, to make a full report of the last five years of Chekhov's life. They were crowded years. Chekhov, as usual, moved around a great deal. Sometimes he was happy at Yalta,
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often he fumed and yawned in the dull, provincial life of the town. These were the years during which a new edition of his works was published, an edition that is now considered incom- plete and badly annotated, but which was of great importance in its day; the years of his warm and generous and loyal rela- tions with Maxim Gorki—Chekhov resigned from the Academy when Gorki was refused admission and he invited Gorki to live in his house when Gorki was under police supervision; the years of his complex relations with the Moscow Art Theatre; the years of his greatest powers as a writer, and of his greatest rewards.
And, at the age of 41, he got married. Chekhov biographers offer us a picture of Olga Knipper as a charming and intelligent woman deeply in love with, and deeply loved by, a brilliant and famous man. There is, of course, no tape measure for in-loveness, but the biographers' picture cannot be the whole truth because many of the facts do not support it. There has been a strange lack of speculation about the relationship between Chekhov and Knipper—every other aspect of Chekhov's life has been rather overexplored—and it is difficult to know the reason why. Perhaps because both people are, in a sense, of our generation, we wish to accept Chekhov's letters to Knipper at their charm- ing face value. Perhaps most of us do not wish to see trouble in the marital relations of people we admire, not so much out of kindheartedness as out of fear that we will grow depressed about our own.
I think it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Chekhov marriage was not a good marriage. Indeed, it seems to me to have been a sad marriage. Knipper was a charming and talented young woman, but she was an ambitious woman who covered her ambition with self-righteous talk about duty to her art. She is one—and it is amazing how little she differs from the rest—in a long line of ladies who want love and all the good things that go with it, but who haven't the slightest intention of
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giving up much to get it. After the marriage she stayed on with her career in Moscow, her husband stayed on in Yalta, and they came together only occasionally like secret lovers on holiday trips. True, Chekhov urged her not to sacrifice her career to his invalid's life, but his words were laid over with loneliness and it seems that a warmer heart would have understood the isola- tion and the fears of a sick man. True, Knipper cried out in her letters that she did want to come to him, but she seldom came. Her letters are full of guilt, which is what makes them often so boring, and sometimes her guilt makes her sound angry with her husband. She was obviously a childish woman, not only crying to get her own way, but demanding to be assured that her own way was the best and only way for both of them. Her letters tell him of the grand parties she has been to in Moscow and then, catching herself, she says that she finds the parties dull and foolish. She never seems to notice that Chekhov, in answering, shows his own desire for a little pleasure, a little party gaiety. One biographer says, "It helped him (Chekhov) to know that despite the excitements of Moscow, Olga's thoughts were constantly with him." It may have helped him, but not very much. He was a man and not a saint. There have always been Knippers in the international theatre, and they do not change with the husband, the education, the century or the regime. It seems as foolish to glorify Knipper as it would be to condemn her.
It should be said that life with Chekhov at the time Knipper married him could not have been ideal for an attrac- tive young woman. He was a very sick man, he was famous and she was not, his natural high spirits were completely circum- scribed by sickness, and he had a doting and possessive family who, under the best circumstances, would have irritated any bride. A house of illness is always a gloomy house, and the house of a middle-agcd bridegroom is set in its ways, and Yalta was a dull, provincial town filled with the aged and the com- plaining, and Knipper had a miscarriage of the child they both wanted, and so on down a long, long list of troubles. And it is doubtful if Chekhov was a man of passion. He was romantic and tender and he loved women, but if he ever had been a man of passion it was now too late.
The nature of the Chekhov marriage would not be of any great significance if everything in it—and everything lacking in it—were not such remarkable clues to his life and work. Here, in the mirror of the marriage, is all of him: the gentle pride—he would not beg or ask favors from Knipper, nor chas- tise her for not giving them; the ability to accept what life offered and to make the most of it; the sweetness of his nature, and the sadness; the refusal to fool himself. In the married Chekhov there are the thousand sides that make the work so wonderful. Conversely, what we miss in the marriage is exactly what we miss in the work: there is a lack of passion and of power. Chekhov was without that final spiritual violence which the very great creative genius has always had. And he knew it as he knew most things about himself.
In June, 1904, he went to Germany with Knipper. On the night of July 1st, for the first time in the history of his illness, he asked to see a doctor. His conversation with the doctor had a kind of noble humor. The doctor ordered an ice pack placed on his heart and Chekhov said, "You don't put an ice pack on an empty heart." Then the doctor insisted that he drink a glass of champagne. Chekhov's last words were, "It's a long time since I've had any champagne." They are perhaps the pleasantest last words ever spoken.
Chekhov's body, on its way home to Russia, traveled in a railroad coach marked "Fresh Oysters." This was an ending so pat-ironic, so ham, that while a lesser writer might have used it for the ending of "A Tiresome Tale," no writer as good as Chekhov would have touched it, and biographers should not be too sure that it would have amused him.
But Moscow paid him great honor: his death was a time of national mourning. He was more beloved than he ever knew. Years before, Tolstoy had said, "What a beautiful, magnificent man. He is simply wonderful."
To ALEXEI SUVORIN
April i, 1897, Moscow The doctors diagnosed tuberculosis in the upper part of the lungs and have prescribed a change in my way of life. I can grasp the first but not the second, which is just about impos- sible. I have been definitely ordered into the country, but certainly, continual living in the country presupposes continual trouble with peasants, animals, natural elements of various kinds, and it is as hard to protect yourself from fuss and trouble in rural areas as it is from burns in hell. Still, I shall try to change my life to the fullest possible extent and have already sent word through Masha that I am giving up medical practice. For me this will be both a relief and a severe deprivation. I am dropping official duties, am buying a dressing gown, will warm my bones in the sun and eat a lot. The doctors have ordered me to eat about six times a day and are in a state of indignation because I eat very little. I have been forbidden to do much talking, to swim and so forth and so on.
Except for my lungs, all my organs were found healthy. . . . Hitherto it seemed to me I drank exactly as much as would do me no harm; the latest checkup shows I drank less than I had a right to. What a pity!