Books: Power of Negative Thinking

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Chekhov was himself a portable sickroom, a walking one-man plague. At 24, he coughed blood for the first time, heralding the tuberculosis that would kill him 20 years later. In letter after letter, he issued bulletins on "my phlebitis in the left leg," on palpitations of the heart ("Every minute my heart stops for several seconds and does not beat"), on hemorrhoids ("a vile, despicable malady"), and even recognized the psychosomatic nature of some of his ailments. ("My intestinal catarrh left me the moment I left Uncle's. Evidently the odor of sanctity has a weakening effect on my insides.")

"The Hell with Philosophy." Yet he showed intestinal fortitude at the rarest moments. When The Seagull flopped miserably on its St. Petersburg opening, Chekhov went home, "gave myself a dose of castor oil, took a cold bath—and now I wouldn't even mind doing another play." When the 37-year-old Chekhov collapsed from a tuberculous attack in 1897, the great Tolstoy stormed past the nurses to soothe the patient with bedside chitchat, but stayed on to argue that a work of art only fulfilled its function if an uneducated peasant could understand it. By the time Tolstoy left, Chekhov had had a serious relapse.

Tolstoy always roused warring feelings in Chekhov. He could wholeheartedly write, "I have never loved anyone as much as him," but the sage's moralizing struck him as twaddle. "Old men have always been prone to see the end of the world," he wrote. "The hell with the philosophy of the great of this world!"

In his Black Sea exile at Yalta (the doctors ordered him out of the Moscow climate), Chekhov yearned for Moscow as wistfully as any of the famed trio in The Three Sisters. At 41, he made his last pass at life by marrying the actress Olga Knipper. He called her his "kitten," "pup," "lamb," and "my little crocodile," but she was really something of a big-name hunter out to bag the half-dead lion of the Russian theater. They scarcely lived together, but she was with him on a trip through Germany in 1904 when the final TB attack came. 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: "It's a long time since I've had any champagne."