The gentrification of the Chekhovs proceeded. The conductor Shostakovsky befriended Kolia after hearing him play; other musicians became family friends. From November 1884, in true bourgeois style, the Chekhovs assigned each Tuesday evening for guests and concerts. Somehow the old patriarch, or the tramontano as Aleksandr and Anton called him, was quelled into good behaviour. Masha was hostess to her brother and her parties assembled Dunia Efros and Lily and Nelli Markova for what she promised would be ‘Crazy nights!’ Palmin reported to the inquisitive Leikin ‘A few days ago I went to the Chekhovs’ Tuesday. They have a soirée fixe.’
Leikin was proud of his own recent gentility which hard work and fame had bought: ‘we don’t blow our noses with our left leg,’ he boasted and decided Anton was now fit to invite to Petersburg. Chekhov despatched Natalia Golden to see Leikin; she seemed to herald Anton’s imminent move to Petersburg, as writer and doctor. Leikin was torn between a desire to make his protégé famous and an instinct to protect his monopoly. Boasting overrode self-interest, and, although a year would pass before he summoned Anton to Petersburg, Leikin revealed to his own employer, Khudekov, editor of the prestigious daily Petersburg Newspaper, the identity of Antosha Chekhonte. Khudekov immediately commissioned from Chekhov a commentary on the Rykov fraud trial that was still dragging on in Moscow.
Notes
1 See OR, 331 82 15: Nikolai’s letters to Pavel Chekhov, 1879–87.
2 There was a much younger fourth Markova sister, Nina. See RGALI, 549 1 352 and 549 3 1 for Elizaveta Markova-Sakharova’s and Nina Markova’s recollections of the Chekhov brothers.
3 See OR, 331 82 21: Nikolai’s letters to Anton, 1883–9, and OR, 331 47 45b: A. S. Kiseliov’s letters to Anton, 1886.
4 See OR, 331 42 7: Liubov Dankovskaia’s letters to Anton, 1884: October.
5 Pakosti for Novosti; News of the Day was delivered to the Chekhovs in the mid 1880s: Evgenia read it and, to Pavel’s annoyance, then mislaid it.
FIFTEEN
Babkino
January–July 1885
The Petersburg Gazette liked Chekhov’s reportage on the Rykov fraud trial. The trial was spectacular not just for the eloquence of Plevako, Russia’s most colourful defence lawyer.1 In the courtroom Anton had an ominous hæmorrhage from the right lung. In May 1885 Khudekov commissioned from Chekhov a regular story for the Monday issue (the day when Leikin did not contribute) of The Petersburg Newspaper. Khudekov thought that Chekhov’s prose had a salacious ‘whiff’, and offered only 7 kopecks a line, but The Petersburg Newspaper was a major newspaper, exempt from precensorship, and its fiction escaped the mutilations inflicted on ‘lower-class’ weeklies. With Leikin’s 8 kopecks a line and Khudekov’s 7, Petersburg gave Anton a living. He had, however, to appear in person if he was to establish himself in literary circles. He still had not given literature priority over medicine. Leikin insisted, in March 1885, that in any case Anton had to come to Petersburg if he sought a post as a doctor.
Anton played along with Palmin’s gallows-humour attitude to his profession. He saw its grim side. Why concentrate on a cholera epidemic, when in Moscow alone 100 children died daily of cold and hunger? The sick were dangerous. In March 1887 Nikolai Korobov, also newly qualified, nearly died of typhus. Doctors risked cholera and diphtheria from those they tried to save.2 The worst hazard was exhaustion. Patients would drag Anton to the outskirts of Moscow on any pretext. Even those who knew him well did not think twice about calling him out. Mikhail Diukovsky wrote on a freezing December day: ‘For God’s sake, if you can, go and see my brother-in-law Evgraf this evening, I’ve just had news that he’s very ill. Don’t decline, I shall be eternally grateful. The address is Krasnoe village, by the Riazan gate.3
Two days later, on New Year’s Eve, Chekhov had a note from Palmin: ‘I’m sitting drinking vodka by the window. A young man has a deep wound on his shoulder-blade. A carbuncle or something – deciding is the job of Mr Requiem or Mr Coffin or Mr Rest-in-peace or even Messrs Wormeaten, if not the famous (in the future) Doctor Chekhov.’ Palmin might pay Chekhov with a poem, but useful recompense was rare. Banter with patients could turn to horror. In early 1885 the Ianova girls, the third set of three sisters in Anton’s life, were flirtatious patients. Not for long were they three sisters: at the end of 1885, typhus struck. Their mother and one of the three sisters (clutching Anton’s arm as she died) perished.4
Anton’s own health worried him. On 7 December 1884, he told Leikin, he had bled again. He insisted that his lungs were sound, that only a vessel in his throat had burst. His denial to a schoolmate, the journalist Sergeenko, ‘hæmorrhage (not tubercular)’ suggests that he knew the truth. To others he complained fulsomely of overwork. He told Lily Markova that he was in pain. In December 1884 at a spiritualist seance Turgenev’s ghost apparently spoke to Anton: ‘Your life is approaching its decline.’ In a letter of 31 January 1885 to Uncle Mitrofan, congratulating him on election to the town council, Anton’s anxiety is ill-disguised: ‘In December I had a hæmorrhage and decided to take money from the Literary Fund5 and go abroad for treatment. I’m a bit better now, but I still think I shall have to make a trip.’
In early 1885 the Chekhov household became quieter, even though Saveliev, not yet qualified, lodged with the Chekhovs again and put up with Pavel’s fits of temper. Pavel had expelled Aunt Fenichka from the house into her son’s care, and had banished Kolia. Anton did not press Kolia to return and merely urged him to pay his debts. To Uncle Mitrofan, however, he painted a picture of domestic harmony:
Even Mama, the eternal grumbler, has started to admit that in Moscow we live better than before. Nobody grudges her expenses, there is no illness in the house. It’s not luxury, but nobody goes without. Vania is at the theatre at the moment. He has a job in Moscow and is pleased. He is one of the family’s most decent, solid members … He’s hard-working and honest. Kolia is thinking of marrying. Misha finishes school this year.
Aleksandr finally found a posting and, after squeezing payment out of Davydov, editor of the now defunct Spectator, left Moscow to become an Excise Officer in Petersburg. To his parents’ outrage, on 26 August 1884 Anna had given birth to a boy, named after Kolia. Aleksandr despatched Anna to stay with relatives and friends in Tula. In Petersburg, Aleksandr had a pensionable job, free fuel and housing, a maid, a wet nurse, the much-travelled hound Gershka, and a baby. Leikin accepted his stories and he acted as Anton’s agent, but happiness eluded Aleksandr, for he squandered his salary. After Easter 1885 Anna, eaten up with jealousy and TB, conceived again. The wet nurse went down with intermittent fever; her husband moved in; Katka, the maid, stole food. The amœba-ridden waters of the Neva made Aleksandr ill. He told Anton: ‘The flatulence is so great that I am writing you this letter by the light of a gas lamp stuck up my anus.’
Kolia faded out from the College of Art and Architecture. With no military exemption or valid identity papers, he went underground. Only through Anna Ipatieva-Golden could he be traced. He defaulted on all undertakings. Leikin was furious. When spring came Anton was forced to intervene. He decided to take Kolia to Babkino, away from Anna Golden: ‘I’ll take that fraud Kolia, remove his boots and put him under lock and key.’
At Babkino the Chekhov family could live next door to their hosts, the Kiseliovs. The Kiseliovs completely refurbished the dacha that Boleslav Markevich had occupied. (Anton admitted to Leikin that he expected Markevich’s ghost at night.) On 6 May 1885 Anton, Masha and their mother – Kolia, Vania and Misha were to follow – set off. The railway had not yet reached Voskresensk: it was a hard day’s cart journey from the railhead. They nearly drowned fording the Istra in the dark, Masha and Evgenia screeching with fear. They found the dacha ready, with ashtrays and cigarette boxes. Nightingales sang in the bushes. Leikin disapproved of Anton’s flight to the country. On 9 May Anton tried to lure him:
I feel in the seventh heaven and do idle silly things: I eat, drink, sleep, fish, went shooting once. Today we caught a burbot on a long pike h
ook, the day before yesterday my fellow-huntsman killed a doe hare. Levitan the artist (not your [Adolf] Levitan, but [Isaak] the landscape painter) is living with me, he’s a passionate shooter. It’s he who killed the hare…. If you come to Moscow this summer and make a pilgrimage to New Jerusalem I promise you something you’ve never seen anywhere … Luxuriant nature! You could pick it up and eat it.
Although Anton’s happiest stories come from summer 1885 at Babkino, he could not escape his new profession. As well as the irrational Kolia, Anton took charge of Isaak Levitan. Levitan lived across the river with a potter at the village of Maksimovka. He was a dangerous patient. When Misha and Anton called on Levitan at night, he leapt out at them with a revolver. Anton told Leikin (who told all Petersburg): ‘Something ominous is happening to the poor man. Psychosis is beginning … I was told that he’d left for the Caucasus. At the end of April he returned, but not from the Caucasus. He tried to hang himself. I’ve taken him with me to the country and now I’m walking him.’
Kolia, now taking opium, also needed care, but he was elusive. Pavel wrote to Aleksandr in early June:
I haven’t seen Kolia for a long time since our people went to Babkino. They say he’s in Moscow … A woman came on behalf of Anna [Ipatieva-Golden] from the cottage at Petrovsko-Razumovskoe to fetch his linen … This is what being carried away by women does, they drive a weak man mad. Thus he is given up to idleness, drunkenness and debauchery, so that our labours and cares over his upbringing are naught to him. Woe to his mother, she is worn out with grief over him.
Kolia turned up in Babkino: all June Anton dared not leave the country for more than a few hours, lest Kolia vanish back to wine, morphine and Anna Golden’s bed.
Misha, the antithesis of his eldest brothers, had matriculated; his father was appeased. On 10 May Misha was lured to Babkino by Anton: ‘Before my eyes stretches an extraordinarily warm, gentle landscape: the river, beyond it the forest.’ Anton wrote mostly about fish – ruff, gudgeon, chub, burbot, perch, carp – and sent for more tackle. Anton’s stories, plays and letters show that he was as much The Compleat Angler as Izaac Walton. He was not the only obsessive angler on the Istra: a peasant Nikita was arrested for unbolting railway spikes to use as sinkers for catching burbot – a single-minded character whom Chekhov put in a story ‘The Evildoer’.
Fishing inspired Anton to write more lyrically: ‘The Burbot’ makes poetry out of an angler’s obsession. Seeing landscape through Isaak Levitan’s eyes enriched Anton’s work: after their long walks in May 1885 with gun, rod, or paints and easel, landscape is as evocative in Chekhov’s art as in Levitan’s. The Kiseliov family, too, developed Anton: their anecdotes from the arts world and Maria Kiseliova’s reading of French magazines and novels provided material for Fragments. Aleksei Kiseliov, inhibited by his wife, was animated by the bawdiness of Levitan (‘Leviathan’), Anton and Kolia. On 20 September Kiseliov wrote:
Thank you, dear Anton, for fulfilling my request so punctiliously and for sending an exact representation of your illegitimate children, whose similarity to you is enormous. I immediately took the postcard to Duniasha, the cattle girl, and showed her what you’re capable of and what she can expect if she becomes pregnant by you and is abandoned to the mercy of fate.
In January 1886 Kiseliov complained: ‘The difference between my letters and yours, dear Anton, is that you can boldly read mine to young ladies, whereas I must throw yours into the stove as soon as I’ve read them in case my wife catches sight of them.’
Anton worked a few days as a doctor, relieving Arkhangelsky at the Chikino hospital in early June and performing an autopsy on a peasant. In mid July the madmen in Anton’s care spoilt the idyll. Kolia bolted. Leikin reported: ‘A few days ago your brother Kolia turned up with Aleksandr at my dacha. He pressed me for cartoon topics … A good artist, but we can’t do magazine business with him for he won’t keep his word.’6 A week later Kolia came, drunk, to Leikin’s office in Petersburg, took the topics and an advance of 32 roubles. On 20 July he reappeared in Moscow at The Alarm Clock and then vanished. He was not seen by his brothers or their friends until mid October. By the end of June Levitan was also in Moscow, in bed with ‘catarrhal fever’ (as he called his TB). He sent Anton his gun dog Vesta to look after, and two roubles for his rent. Kolia and Levitan had collaborated in painting sets for the opera; Kolia once painted a figure on Levitan’s empty landscape, and Levitan painted a skyscape over Kolia’s figures. They complemented each other – Levitan an excitable workaholic, reluctant to paint human beings, and Kolia paralytically idle, with a dislike of painting nature. Reluctant as Kolia to return, Levitan made his excuses to Anton: ‘Going to the country now is nonsense: it would be poisoning myself – Moscow would seem a thousand times fouler than now and I’ve got used to the city … in any case I shall soon see the dear inhabitants of Babkino and, among other things, your repulsive face.’
It was very hot at Babkino, and Anton had a hæmorrhage. Nevertheless, in mid July, he went to Moscow to take leave of Aleksandr, who had been appointed Customs Chief at Novorossiisk on the Black Sea, and was passing through Moscow with Anna, baby Kolia and the dog. Vania was travelling with them, to support the ailing Anna on the 1000-mile journey beyond the Don and over the Caucasus. Aleksandr and Anton would not see each other for more than a year.
Babkino had worked its magic. Anton sent to Petersburg a story with a game-keeping background. ‘The Huntsman’ [Jäger]. Short and unpretentious, it pays homage to Turgenev, who had died a year before and whose technique Chekhov was emulating, but it owes much to Levitan’s subtle perception and to Babkino’s atmosphere. Its peasant characters set the pattern for Chekhov’s later love stories. A Chekhovian couple, an unresponsive male and a frustrated female, fail to communicate, while nature all around lives its own life. ‘The Huntsman’ came out in The Petersburg Newspaper on 18 July 1885. Petersburg took heed.
Notes
1 In Chekhov’s circles Plevako was notorious: with the editor of The Alarm Clock, the homicidal Kicheev, he once found a provincial theatre closed: Plevako paid the cashier 500 roubles – a full house takings – and had the actors brought from their hotel to perform, while he and Kicheev lurked invisible in the gallery. Plevako acted for the Chekhovs in 1905.
2 Dr Ilarion Dubrovo’s death from diphtheria on 20 May 1883, after sucking out a child’s infected membranes, inspired stories by both Leskov and Chekhov.
3 See OR, 331 42 54: M. M. Diukovsky’s letters to Anton, 1884–93.
4 See OR, 331 64 46a: Maria Ianova’s letters to Anton, 1885–6.
5 An organization set up in St Petersburg in 1859 to help writers and their families.
6 See OR, 331 50 IV, g: Leikin’s letters to Anton, 1885 and 1886.
SIXTEEN
Petersburg Calls
August 1885–January 1886
AUTUMN 1885 brought Chekhov a social whirlwind. Among Masha’s friends, the fiery Dunia Efros stood out. In Moscow, where the authorities were increasingly hostile to Jews, she would not convert, and insisted on her Hebrew name, Reve-Khave. Anton had many liaisons – with his former landlady, Mrs Golub, with the landlady of friends, Baroness Aglaida Shepping, and, it is said, Blanche, a hostess at the Ermitage. A more serious love, his Natashevu, Natalia Golden, was now thirty. She left Moscow for Petersburg, from where in spring 1885 she wrote Anton a bawdy farewell:
Little bastard Antoshevu, I could hardly bear the wait for your much desired letter. I can feel you are having a merry, free-for-all time in Moscow, and I’m glad for you and envious … I haven’t got married yet, but I probably shall soon and I invite you to my wedding. If you wish, you can bring with you your Countess Shepping, but you will have to bring your own sprung mattress, because here there aren’t any women of such awful dimensions, and otherwise you won’t have anything to be busy on. Since you have turned into a completely debauched man (since I left), you are unlikely to be able to do without — [Natalia’s dashes]. I can’t belong to you any more, s
ince I have found myself a suitable tiger-boy.
Today you are having a ball, I can imagine you desperately flirting with Efros and Iunosheva. Who will win, I wonder? Is it true that Efros’s nose has got 2 inches longer, that’s terrible, a pity, she’ll be kissing you and what sort of children will you have, all that worries me frightfully. I have also heard that Iunosheva’s bust has got bigger, another inconvenience! … Antoshevu, if you are irrevocably lost morally, at least don’t ruin your friends, especially not the married ones. You scoundrel!
I advise you not to marry, you’re still too young … You write rubbish to me, as for the main thing that interests me (more than anything else), your health, not a word about that. You have two diseases, amorousness and spitting blood. The first is not dangerous, but about the second I ask you to give me the most detailed information … So, Antoshevu, perhaps you haven’t forgotten your little skeleton, but I believe that if you come to Petersburg, you haven’t, if you don’t come, you have forgotten her … I shall send you stamps, otherwise I fear that the letters will be lost. Farewell, Antoshevu. Your Natasha. I’m glad medicine is looking up, maybe you’ll write less and be healthier.1
Natalia was not the last woman to send Anton stamps for a reply, but none survives. The field was clear for Dunia Efros: Anton’s business in Petersburg was literary.
Anton was back at Babkino until autumn. Khudekov of The Petersburg Newspaper had not paid him, and it was cheaper living with the Kiseliovs. When he finally returned to Moscow, the Chekhovs moved from quarters that were airy, convenient and cheap. On 11 October 1885, after waiting for the landlord to stain the floors, the Chekhov family crossed the river south to the Bolshaia Iakimanka, Mrs Lebedeva’s house. After five years in one house – the longest period yet in Anton’s life – peregrinations had started again. The new flat was small – too small for soirées, but cheap (40 roubles a month), and closer to Gavrilov’s warehouse. Doctor A. P. Chekhov’s brass plate was mounted, and here he was at home except Tuesdays, Thursday evenings and some Saturdays. A month later, Anton was complaining to Leikin: ‘The new flat has turned out to be rubbish: damp and cold. If I don’t leave it, I shall certainly have last year’s outrage developing in my chest: coughing and spitting blood … Living with the family is horribly nasty.’ There was no money for firewood: The Petersburg Newspaper took months to pay Anton. He wrote again for The Alarm Clock, and collected his fee in person.
Anton Chekhov Page 15
