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When in Three Sisters Olga, Masha and Irina yearn for Moscow, they echo the youthful Chekhov. He fell under the city's spell while attending medical school, where none of his fellow students connected him with "Antosha Chekhonte," the pseudonym under which he wrote comic stories. It was not until 1887, with the staging of his play Ivanov, that the public knew the author as A.P. Chekhov. Reviewers were generally hostile; "a flippantly cynical piece of foolishness, foul and immoral," said the man from the Muscovite Newssheet. But with the appearance of the story The Steppe in 1888, Chekhov was compared with Tolstoy and Gogol.
Fame attracted critics and their pigeonholes. Chekhov would have none of it: "The people I fear are those who look for tendentiousness between the lines . . . I am neither liberal, nor conservative, nor gradualist, nor monk, nor indifferentist. I should like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one."
There was more than figurative truth in the statement. Chekhov suffered a variety of chronic illnesses. Symptoms of tuberculosis appeared when he was graduated from medical school. The fatal disease surely contributed to his doleful outlook, though it does not appear to have affected his compassion. As Troyat suggests, while Chekhov's journey to a remote penal colony was motivated by sympathy, writing The Island of Sakhalin was not a labor of love. Yet the book riveted attention on the inhuman conditions at the Czar's gulag and eventually led to reforms.
On the evidence, Chekhov was always discreet and gentlemanly in his affairs with women. Lydia Avilova, a persistent and hysterical pursuer, was tactfully kept at bay for years. When the playwright finally married, it was to Olga Knipper, one of Moscow's best-known actresses. Unfortunately, her career frequently kept her in the city, and his illness tied him to Yalta. He died at age 44, drinking champagne with Olga at his bedside. The death scene is cordon bleu Chekhov. A large black moth flutters into the room, and as the body of the famous man cools, the cork pops out of the wine bottle. It is the loudest sound in this beautifully modulated book.