A terminally ill man

Here is another text to translate, an excerpt from Wikipedia’s page on Anton Chekhov, depicting the last days of the literary giant: 

By May 1904, Chekhov was terminally ill. “Everyone who saw him secretly thought the end was not far off,” Mihail Chekhov recalled, “but the nearer Chekhov was to the end, the less he seemed to realize it.”On 3 June he set off with Olga for the German spa town of Badenweiler in the Black Forest, from where he wrote outwardly jovial letters to his sister Masha describing the food and surroundings and assuring her and his mother that he was getting better.