Anton Chekhov

by Donald Rayfield

  Notes

  1 This passage (28 Dec. 1885) was cut from the PSSP: see Kuranty, 8 Sept. 1993, 9.

  2 See OR, 331 63 25a: Franz Schechtel’s letters to Anton, 1885–6. The joint effort of hauling Kolia over the coals made Schechtel a family friend of the Chekhovs. Aunt Fenichka even urged him to convert from Catholicism to orthodoxy. When Schechtel was late with sketches for the cover for Motley Stories, Anton gave him, as punishment, a choice of ‘Egyptian plagues’; Schechtel chose No. 10 ‘A pair of circus girls, alive and fresh, delivered to your house’. ‘When,’ Anton asked Schechtel that Easter, ‘are we going to screw the circus girls?’

  III

  My Brothers’ Keeper

  And Joseph nourished his father, and his brethren, and all his father’s household with bread, according to their families.

  Genesis XLVII, 12

  NINETEEN

  The Suvorins

  April–August 1886

  IN APRIL 1886 Anton Chekhov met Suvorin again. A powerful bond, built on misconceptions that would weaken it, was formed. Suvorin saw in Chekhov genius and delicacy; Chekhov saw in Suvorin sensitive authority. Twelve years would pass before Suvorin found the ‘flint’ in Chekhov’s make-up and Chekhov detected the ‘lack of character’ in the publishing baron. They needed each other: New Times had no genius among its talented writers; Chekhov had no other access to Petersburg literary circles. For a decade Chekhov was frank with Suvorin as with nobody else. Suvorin responded to Chekhov with candour; they were soon equals.

  A soldier’s son, born in the heartland of Russia, Voronezh province, Suvorin had much in common with Chekhov: he had fought his way up as teacher, journalist, critic, playwright. He had made his name as a radical in the 1860s, as a friend of Dostoevsky at the end of 1870s and had burst into politics, making New Times a paper that was read, admired and detested – for its closeness to ruling circles, its nationalism and cynicism, its advertisements where unemployed French women ‘sought a position’. Suvorin kept independent: he had a nominal editor, Fiodorov, who kept a suitcase packed, ready to spend a few months in prison for any offence Suvorin might commit. He was now becoming a major publisher and the proprietor of most of Russia’s railway-station bookstalls.

  Suvorin was a complex figure – a man of much wit, but little humour, a supporter of autocracy in his leader articles, an anarchist in his diary. His faults were offset by virtues: the anti-Semitic ravings of New Times were countered by his private fondness for an elderly Jewish lady, his children’s music teacher, who lived in the household. The worst Suvorin’s enemies said of him was that he feared ‘only death and a rival newspaper’. The theatre critic Kugel wrote of him:

  in his fur hat, his fur coat hanging open, carrying a big stick, I almost always saw the figure of Ivan the Terrible … Something foxy in the lower jaw, in the gape, something sharp in the line of his forehead. A Mephistopheles … The secret of his influence and his sharp vision was that, like the greatest political and philosophical geniuses, he deeply understood the bad side of human nature … The way he entertained Chekhov, looked at him, enveloped him with his eyes reminded one somehow of a rich man showing off his new ‘kept woman’.

  Suvorin’s first wife, Anna Ivanovna, died in circumstances that won even his enemies’ pity. One summer evening in 1873 Suvorin, entirely unsuspecting, was summoned to a hotel room, where he found her dying of a revolver wound inflicted in a suicide pact with her lover. A few years later, Suvorin married another Anna Ivanovna, twenty-two years younger than he: she, though flirtatious, defended her husband like a tigress; he loved her, he declared, third after his newspaper and his theatre. Suvorin suffered one bereavement after another: in 1880 his daughter Aleksandra died and then her infant son, Suvorin’s first grandchild. Two of his sons and a favourite son-in-law would also die before him. He became a lonely insomniac. Suvorin rarely went to bed before his paper came out, and spent hours alone in his office with just a cup of coffee and a chicken breast for sustenance. He strode the streets and cemeteries of Petersburg. After his bereavements began, he retreated to the country, allowing his son Aleksei, ‘the Dauphin’, to wrest power from him and, eventually, to undo his empire.

  Like Anton Chekhov’s, Suvorin’s love for his many dependants could give way to irritation. Like Anton, Suvorin would long for company when alone, and for solitude when in company. Suvorin had, however, the warmth of the nepotist. Anton Chekhov was not the first alumnus of the Taganrog gimnazia he was to adopt: his legal manager, Aleksei Kolomnin, left Taganrog ten years before Chekhov, and married Suvorin’s daughter. Suvorin had taken the entire Kolomnin family under his wing. Now the Chekhovs came under his aegis, Suvorin was to offer employment to Aleksandr, Vania, Masha and Misha Chekhov. Soon Anton would have his flat in the Suvorin house and be offered Suvorin’s younger daughter, Nastia, then nine years old, in marriage.

  Forty years later Anna Suvorina would recall Anton’s visit that spring:

  Our apartment was unusual: the hall was the domain of the children … In one corner stood an aviary with a pine tree where up to fifty canaries and finches lived and bred. The hall was sunlit, the birds sang loudly, the children, naturally, made a lot of noise and I must add that the dogs also took part … we sat down together on a little sofa by the aviary. He asked the children the names of all the dogs, said he was very fond of dogs himself and then made us laugh … We talked for rather a long time … he was tall, slim, very good-looking, he had dark reddish waving hair, a little greying, he had slightly clouded eyes that laughed subtly, and a fetching smile. His voice was pleasant and soft and, with a barely perceptible smile … Chekhov and I quickly became friends, we never quarrelled but we argued often, almost to the point of tears – or at least I did. My husband just adored him, as if Anton had bewitched him.1

  Anton won the hearts of Suvorin’s children (even, for a while, of the Dauphin), of his valet Vasili Iulov and the children’s governess Emilie Bijon. The philosopher Vasili Rozanov, also rescued from obscurity by Suvorin, contemplated the publisher’s love: ‘If Chekhov had said “I now need a flat, a desk, shoes, peace and a wife,” Suvorin would have told him “Take everything I have.” Literally.’2

  The journalists in Suvorin’s entourage were jealous. One, Viktor Burenin, was Suvorin’s oldest friend and perhaps his only confidant. Burenin could, with unprintable epigrams and printed barbs, destroy a sensitive writer. Twenty years earlier, when Suvorin sat on a park bench, too poor to hire a midwife for his pregnant wife, Burenin, then a student, had talked to him and insisted on giving him all the money he had. They became inseparable. Burenin’s prognosis, as much as Grigorovich’s enthusiasm, persuaded Suvorin of Chekhov’s importance, but Burenin was allowed to attack Suvorin’s favourites with impunity and soon turned on Chekhov: the spiteful New Times clique very soon germinated in Petersburg a hostility to Chekhov.

  Anton had a happy spring in 1886: he hardly slept. Suppers with Suvorin, being lionized, intoxicated him. He could now write less for more money: Leikin no longer counted on a weekly contribution. That spring Chekhov gave New Times just one story of note, ‘The Secret Councillor’. A touching portrayal of the disarray brought into a country household by the arrival of a distinguished relative, the story anticipates the pattern of Uncle Vania: a great man comes from the city and wrecks the lives of his country relatives. ‘The Secret Councillor’ abandoned the sensational tone that Suvorin’s readers liked. It is a work that looks back to Anton’s childhood in the country around Taganrog and that injects for the first time an element of nostalgia for a lost idyll, which is to colour much of Chekhov’s mature prose.

  Kiseliov and all Babkino were calling for Anton. Mosquitoes whined; goldfinches sang. Kolia took his paints and brushes, but left his toothbrush and his sackcloth trousers with Anna Golden. Anton hoped that the artist would win over the lover, and ignored letters from Franz Schechtel, raging at Kolia’s drunken binges. By 29 April Kolia hurt Schechtel more: he forced Lentovsky, for whose theatre the
architect and painter were commissioned, to disgorge another 100 roubles and promptly vanished to Babkino, making sorties to Moscow only for debauchery. Schechtel raged and despaired; he even tried to lure Kolia by putting a letter in an envelope marked ‘contains 3000 roubles’: ‘Friend! I have two overcoats, but fuck-all money – but there’ll be some soon … if you’d come and see me for a minute …’3 Schechtel complained to Anton of Levitan’s dissipation, too; fornication did not stop Levitan painting, but Schechtel complained to Anton:

  Levitan is ploughing and sighing for his bare-bottomed beauty, but the wretch is only human: what will it cost him on quicklime, disinfectant, eau de Cologne and other chemicals and how much trouble to treat his amorous slut and make her fit to receive his thoroughbred organ? …

  Levitan arrived late in Babkino: he was detained in the Crimea, whence he wrote to Chekhov: ‘What made you assume I’d gone off with a woman? There is screwing here, but it was there before I arrived. And I’m not hunting for fine picturesque pussy, it just happened to be there (and, alas, has gone).’4 Once Kolia and Levitan were at Babkino, the fun began. On 10 May Anton reached Moscow from Petersburg; the next day he took his mother, sister and Misha to Babkino. They painted, fished, bathed, and played: Levitan would dress as a savage Chechen, or the Chekhov brothers would hold mock trials of Kolia and Levitan for drunkenness and debauchery. Anton composed ‘Soft-Boiled Boots’, illustrated nonsense worthy of Edward Lear, to amuse the Kiseliov children. Somehow he found time to dispense medicine, and write for Fragments, The Petersburg Newspaper and New Times – comic classics, such as ‘Novel with Double Bass’. Anton wrote his first philosophical stories, such as ‘The Dreariness of Life’, where activists and quietists debate what a civic-minded Russian ought to do. In Chekhov’s world, unlike the world of Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, neither party wins the debate: there is an ideological stalemate. This summer Anton was groping for a new type of story, that would evoke the futility of words and thoughts. In 1886 he wrote far less than in 1885, but he was preparing himself for the real mastery of his prose of the following year.

  No sooner was Kolia rescued from Anna Golden’s bed and Moscow’s drinking dens, than Aleksandr burst back into Anton’s life. On 21 May 1886, in Novorossiisk, Aleksandr dictated a letter for Anton: Anna added a desperate postscript of her own:

  For God’s sake, suggest what we can do. Aleksandr suddenly went blind at 5 p.m.; after dinner he went to bed as usual, after drinking a great deal, then he woke at 5, came out of the room to play with the children and asked for water, sat down on the bed and tells me he can’t see.

  Kolia insisted that Aleksandr was acting, but the act was convincing: Aleksandr was given leave to go to Moscow and Petersburg for treatment. On 3 June he arrived at Vania’s schoolhouse in Moscow. From there Pavel wrote to Anton:

  I ask my children to look after their eyes above all things, do your reading by day, not by night, act sensibly, to be eyeless is bad, to beg alms and assistance is a great misfortune. Kolia and Misha, look after your eyes. You still have to live long and be useful to society and yourself. If you lose your good sight it is disagreeable to me to see. Aleksandr can see nothing, he is handed bread and a spoon and that is it. These are the consequences of wilfulness and of letting his reason incline to the bad.

  Aleksandr, Anna, their illegitimate sons, and Anna’s elder children, who drifted in and out of her care, lasted two months with Pavel and Vania in the school house. Pavel kept calm. Aleksandr was drying out, and his sight was returning. On 10 July 1886 he told Anton:

  Imagine, after supper, I was banging away with my equine penis at the ‘mother of my children’. Father was reading his Monastic Rules and suddenly decided to come in with a candle to see if the windows were locked … He solemnly went up to the window, locked it as if he hadn’t noticed anything, had the sense to put out the candle and left in the dark. I even fancied he said a prayer to the icon.5

  In mid July Kolia vanished again – to cousin Georgi and Uncle Mitrofan in Taganrog. Aleksandr and his family came to Babkino. Anton was aghast: he wanted other company. He failed to lure Franz Schechtel from Moscow, even though he exhorted him, ‘living in town in summer is worse than pederasty, more immoral than buggery’. Anton moved twenty miles south to Zvenigorod, ostensibly to depute for Dr Uspensky at the hospital. After Petersburg, Chekhov felt imposed upon by his brothers. Fame brought bitter poison: the prestigious The Northern Herald reviewed Motley Tales: ‘[Mr Chekhov] will like a squeezed-out lemon inevitably die, completely forgotten, in a ditch … In general Mr Chekhov’s book is a very sad and tragic spectacle of a young talent’s suicide …’ Chekhov never forgave N. K. Mikhailovsky, to whom he attributed this review.6

  The more he felt put upon, the greater his need for Masha. Now she had her diploma, she had grown confident. She had a profession for the coming twenty years: she taught part-time in Moscow in the prestigious Rzhevskaia girls’ grammar school, run by a family of farmers and thus known as the ‘Dairy School’. Masha was now more than an agency by which Anton could meet strong-minded, intelligent young women. Evgenia was surrendering the household to her. In early August 1886 it was Masha who left Babkino to seek a quieter flat for the family. Like many a sister in the nineteenth century, she was a handmaiden so prized by her siblings that cousin Georgi proclaimed to Anton: ‘I have concluded from all the attractive stories from Misha that she is your goddess of something kind, good and precious.’7

  More servant than goddess to her brothers, Masha’s first conflict of interests arose in Babkino in summer 1886. Taught by Levitan, Masha was painting very fine water-colour landscapes and portraits. Levitan made hundreds of propositions to hundreds of women, but only one proposal. Seventy years later, at the age of ninety-two, Masha recalled it:

  Levitan dropped to his knees in front of me and – a declaration of love … All I could do was turn and run. The whole day, I sat distraught in my room crying, my head deep in the pillow. Levitan, as always, came to dinner. I stayed in my room. Anton asked everyone why I wasn’t there … He got up and came to my room. ‘Why are you howling?’ I told him what had happened and admitted I didn’t know what to tell Levitan, and how. My brother replied: ‘Of course, you can marry him if you like, but remember that he wants women of the Balzac age, not girls like you.’

  Whenever Masha referred proposals to Anton, she received a strong negative signal. Anton never expressly forbade her to marry, but his silence and his actions, if necessary, behind the wings left her in no doubt how much he disapproved and how deeply he was dismayed.

  Anton could stop his sister marrying, but he could not keep his girlfriends on stand-by. Despite chocolates from Petersburg, Dunia Efros kept her distance; Olga Kundasova fell instead for Professor Bredikhin, at the Moscow observatory. Lily Markova vanished to Ufa, among the Bashkirs in the Urals foothills. Finally, in Petersburg, she accepted the artist Sakharov. Aleksei Kiseliov thought Anton’s love life hilarious and celebrated it in verse that was recited all around Babkino.

  To A. P. Chekhov

  Sákharov got married

  And he was not thrilled

  When he found that Lily

  Was already drilled.

  Who? he’d like to know.

  The truth is what he’s after.

  But Lily and Anton

  Can’t hold back their laughter.

  The groom is coming, scowling,

  And if he gets his hands on

  That wretched whoring Chekhov,

  He’ll loudly thump Anton

  And give him such a thrashing

  So that he’ll remember

  To keep off others’ brides

  With his dripping member.8

  Others saw Anton as a threat to the married. When Bilibin’s wife, Vera, read a story Anton wrote that August for New Times, ‘A Misfortune’, she told her husband that the ruthless seducer of the married heroine was Chekhov himself. Vera Bilibina refused to greet Anton when he visited the house. Four years later Bilibin
deserted her for Anna Arkadievna Soloviova, a secretary at Fragments. Vera always felt that Anton had exerted a pernicious influence on her husband.

  Notes

  1 Anna Suvorina’s memoir is in M. D. Beliaev, A. S. Dolinin, A. P. Chekhov. Zateriannye proizvedneiia, Neizdannye pis’ma, Novye vospominaiia. Leningrad: Atenei, 1925, 185–95.

  2 See Pis’ma A. S. Suvorina k V. V. Rozanovu, Spb, 1913, 10; see also V. V. Rozanov, Mimoliotnoe 1994, 133–4.

  3 See OR, 331 63 25e: Franz Schechtel’s two letters to Nikolai Chekhov, 1886.

  4 Cut from Levitan: Pis’ma, 1956; see OR, 331 49 25a, Levitan’s letters to Anton, 1885–6.

  5 Cut from Pis’ma k A. P. Chekhova 1939: see OR, 331 32 12.

  6 In fact the author was Skabichevsky, a critic as scabious as his name.

  7 See OR, 331 33 5b: Georgi Chekhov’s letters to Anton, 1888: 30 Apr.

  8 See OR, 331 47 45b: A. S. Kiseliov’s twenty letters to Anton, 1886.

  TWENTY

  Life in a Chest of Drawers

  September 1886–March 1887

  MASHA AND MISHA rented from a surgeon, Dr Korneev, new premises for the family: a two-storey brick house, eight rooms for 650 roubles a year, on the west side of the Moscow Garden Ring, then a country road where a horse tram passed once an hour. Anton moved in on 1 September 1886. Here the Chekhovs spent nearly four years. The only Chekhov residence in Moscow to be made into a museum, its fussy red-brick façade reminded Anton of a chest of drawers. Anton lived like a gentleman in his study and bedroom. On the ground floor was an enormous kitchen and pantry leading to the chamber maid’s and cook’s rooms. Upstairs Masha’s room adjoined the drawing room; her guests’ siren voices lured Anton up from his study. The dining room was also upstairs: the tramp of feet on the stairs never ceased. Under the stairs the ageing whippet Korbo dozed. Pavel visited daily, but slept at the warehouse or at Vania’s, a few minutes’ walk away.