cure. Chekhov preferred the latter.

On the 25th of May he married Olga Knipper, one of the leading actresses at
the Art Theatre, and with her went off to the province of Ufa for the
koumiss cure. On the way they had to wait twenty-four hours for a steamer,
in very unpleasant surroundings, at a place called Pyany Bor ("Drunken
Market"), in the province of Vyatka.

In the autumn of 1901 Tolstoy was staying, for the sake of his health, at
Gaspra. Chekhov was very fond of him and frequently visited him. Altogether
that autumn was an eventful one for him: Kuprin, Bunin and Gorky visited
the Crimea; the writer Elpatyevsky settled there also, and Chekhov felt
fairly well. Tolstoy's illness was the centre of general attention, and
Chekhov was very uneasy about him.

In 1902 there was suddenly a change for the worse: violent haemorrhage
exhausted him till the beginning of February; he was for over a month
confined to his study. It was at this time that the incident of Gorky's
election to the Academy and subsequent expulsion from it led Chekhov to
write a letter to the Royal President of the Academy asking that his own
name should be struck off the list of Academicians.

Chekhov had hardly recovered when his wife was taken seriously ill. When
she was a little better he made a tour by the Volga and the Kama as far as
Perm. On his return he settled with his wife in a summer villa not far from
Moscow; he spent July there and returned home to Yalta in August. But the
longing for a life of movement and culture, the desire to be nearer to the
theatre, drew him to the north again, and in September he was back in
Moscow. Here he was not left in peace for one minute; swarms of visitors
jostled each other from morning till night. Such a life exhausted him; he