Anton Chekhov

The home in Yalta (today a Soviet museum) became a Mecca for young writers, importunate fans, touring acting companies, and plain free-loaders. Such pilgrimages, though well meant, did not conduce to Chekhov's peace of mind or body, and his health continued to deteriorate. In December 1903, he came to Moscow to attend rehearsals of The Cherry Orchard; the opening night, 17 January 1904, coincided with his nameday and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the commencement of his literary activity. Emaciated, hunched over, gravely ill, he did not show up until the second act and was made to stay through Act Three when the ceremony to honour him took place, greatly to his surprise.

Despite his rapid decline in health and the disappoint­ment of Olga's miscarriage in 1902, a deeply lyrical tone enters his last writings. His final stories, Lady with Lapdog (Dama s sobachkoy ), The Archbishop (Arkhierey ), and The Darling (Dushenka) present a more accepting view of the cyclical nature of life. They also reveal an almost musical attention to the structure and sounds of words, to be remarked as well in that last 'comedy' The Cherry Orchard.

In June 1904 his doctors ordered Chekhov to Baden- weiler, a small health resort in the Black Forest. There the forty-four-year old writer died on July 2. Shortly before his death, the doctor recommended putting an ice pack on his heart. 'You don't put ice on an empty heart,' Chekhov protested. When they insisted that he drink champagne, his last words came, 'It's been a long time sinced I've drunk champagne'. He was unconsciously echoing the line of the old nurse Marina in Uncle Vanya, 'It's a long time since I've tasted noodles'. Chekhov's obsequies were a comedy of errors he might have appreciated: the railway carriage that bore his body to St Petersburg was stencilled with the label 'Fresh Oysters,' and at the Moscow cemetery, the bystand­ers spent more time ogling Maksim Gorky and the basso Chaliapin than in mourning.⁶ Inadvertently, the procession became entangled with that of General Keller, a military hero who had been shipped home from the Far East, and Chekhov's friends were startled to hear an army band accompanying the remains of a man who had always been chary of grand gestures.

2

At the Play

'It is easy to convince the sentimental and credulous populace that the theatre, such as it is, is a school. But anyone who knows what a school is will not fall for this bait. I don't know what will happen fifty or a hundred years from now, but in its present state the theatre can only serve as an amusement.' The first-person narrator of A Boring Story, 1889

After his family moved to Moscow, Chekhov the schoolboy became an inveterate spectator at the Taganrog Civic Theatre, in company with his enthusiastic uncle Mitrofan. At this very time, the Taganrog management had com­pletely refurbished the repertory to suit a new building constructed in 1865. Formerly, the local company had played an outworn stock of Kotzebue and Pixerecourt, Lensky's vaudevilles and the grandiloquent patriotic dramas of Polevoy. The new management endeavoured to introduce the Taganrog public to more ambitious fare, enabling them to see Italian opera, along with Gogol's Inspector General and Getting Married, and the 'new drama' of Ostrovsky, Potekhin, Dyachenko, and Shpazhinsky. The newness now seems tenuous as Dyachenko's society dramas are one step away from Lady Audley's Secret, but as an impressionable adolescent, Chekhov observed what was taken to be the latest thing - problem plays, peasant dramas, and comedies of byt or everyday life, full of brutish merchants, virtuous muzhiks and improvident nobles. He also cherished a fondness for the older varieties of romantic melodrama, such as Dumas' Kean, and The Mail Robbery (the Russian Lyons Mail), which turns up in The Seagull as a memory of Shamraev the anecdotal overseer.