Anton Chekhov

by Donald Rayfield

  On 1 May Suvorin’s fourth son, the twenty-one-year-old Vladimir, shot himself dead. Aleksandr sent a postcard, discreetly in Latin: ‘Plenissima perturbatio in redactione. Senex aegrotissimus est. Dolor communis …’ Suvorin felt guilty for ignoring his son’s play, An Old Eye Is No Bar to the Heart. He recalled his first wife’s suicide and blamed himself for both deaths:

  Yesterday Volodia shot himself … Eternally alone, eternally by himself. Yesterday I listened to his strange comedy – everywhere clever, original. He would’ve been a talented man. And again I failed to do a thing.1

  Leikin wrote to Anton a week later: ‘[Vladimir] just left a note to say that he was fed up with life and supposed that the next world is better than this. Poor Suvorin, completely shattered with grief, was taken yesterday to his estate in Tula Province.’ A theme of The Seagull was born. Chekhov felt for Suvorin. Suvorin’s sons were as doomed as Chekhov’s elder brothers – despair linked the two men.

  The Chekhovs celebrated Easter loudly, but without Anton. Pavel reported:

  Officer Tyshko came, and Dolgov, who drank three bottles of beer and nearly smashed the piano with his heavy blows. He played well, with verve. Then Mr Korneev and Mlles Ianova, Efros and Korneev’s niece and in the evening Korneev’s children, who amazed me with their gutter language … I remain your loving P. Chekhov.

  The family was reassured by Kolia: he agreed to spend the summer with them in Babkino. Aleksandr, however, sent them appeal after appeal from Petersburg. His sons had typhoid, but no hospital would take in children who had no birth certificates. Meanwhile, Aleksandr could not cope with his idle, thieving servant girls. He begged Vania and Masha to send out their mother: ‘The poor children shriek, ask for the “potty” and dirty the bed. I’m out all night. Really it wouldn’t be wrong for mother to come.’2 Speaking for the whole family, Kolia protested to Masha:

  When a few years ago little Mosia fell ill in Taganrog, mother went to visit the sick little girl and look after her and what happened? Mother was exhausted, gave it up as a bad job and Aleksandr tore his hair and went to church to weep … If we send mother to Petersburg, the same will happen again, mother will be unhappy and Aleksandr’s life poisoned.3

  Whenever Aleksandr’s illegitimate family called for help, the Chekhovs hardened their hearts. They detested Anna and her children by Aleksandr, and would do so until the last of them perished. Aleksandr had to fend for himself; in May his mother and sister left for the country.

  *

  On 5 May Anton went north to the monastery at Sviatye Gory (Sacred Hills) southeast of Kharkov, where 15,000 pilgrims congregated after Easter. The monks gave him a room with a stranger, perhaps a police spy, who told Anton his life story. The impression made on Chekhov by just two days and nights at Sviatye Gory was overwhelming – the hillside forested setting, the church services, the fervent pilgrims. The stories stemming from his travels in the south are infused with a psalmodic reverence for nature, for the pathos, liturgy and clergy, if not the dogma, of Orthodox Christianity. On his way back from Sviatye Gory to Taganrog he met childhood friends: Sasha Selivanova, and Piotr Sergeenko, who would fifteen years later change his life. By 17 May Chekhov was back, penniless, in an unseasonably chilly Moscow: he summoned Schechtel for a frank conversation about the Ianova sisters and sexual frustration, and borrowed 30 roubles. Then Anton joined his mother, sister and Misha in Babkino.

  Suvorin, disabled by bereavement, had neglected the publication of Chekhov’s new book of stories, In the Twilight. Anton had to write more for New Times in order to pay off Suvorin’s advance, and Leikin only received four small stories from him that summer. The Petersburg Newspaper, which paid better and allowed more scope, got nine stories, notably ‘His First Love’, which Chekhov later worked up into a study of adolescent suicide, ‘Volodia’.

  The need to recoup Suvorin’s advance gave the motivation and the journey south the material for the finest prose of the time in Russia. The first prose-poem (a ‘quasi symphony’) of steppe nature, ‘Fortune’, introduces the motif of the breaking string that punctuates The Cherry Orchard, an ominous mine shaft catastrophe deep beneath a doomed landscape. Chekhov could stake a claim to be Russia’s first ‘green’ writer. Even the acerbic Burenin wrote a panegyric; copies of New Times were stolen from Petersburg’s cafés. In ‘Tumbleweed’, the July story for New Times, the police agent that Anton met at the monastery became the baptized Jew – ‘a baptized Jew, a doctored horse, a pardoned thief – all worth the same.’ Here too is a ‘breaking string’ – a falling mine-bucket which cripples the hero.

  Chekhov’s rootless Jew is the culmination of a series of intelligent well-meaning unfortunates who had dominated Russian fiction, the so-called ‘superfluous men’ whom Pushkin and Turgenev had created. Chekhov won recognition for renovating a tired tradition, but tributes to his genius were loudest among musicians, who felt most acutely the musical nature of his prose in its rhythms and the sonata-like structure, where the end recapitulates the beginning after a central development. In May Tchaikovsky was struck by the ecclesiastical story, ‘The Laymen’ (later known as ‘The Letter’): he wrote a letter, that went astray, to Chekhov and also to his brother Modest about it. Through Modest, Piotr Tchaikovsky was to meet the Moscow Chekhovs.4

  *

  Anton would not see Anna in Petersburg: he diagnosed by post from Babkino, guessing from Anna’s medicines and temperature that TB underlay her typhoid. Anton made only one short trip that summer to Moscow to spend a few days with admirers such as Ezhov and Gruzinsky. Gruzinsky was the only person to recall Anton Chekhov in a rage. The Alarm Clock was printing Anton’s sketch, ‘The Diary of a Volatile Person’ in three parts; when Anton found that they had cut his copy, he exploded like his character and left the deputy editor stunned by authorial fury. Ezhov, however, recalled a milder man:

  He had a weak voice. His laughter showed that Chekhov was not inclined to get angry. When writing he suddenly smiled. This smile was special, without the usual proportion of irony, not humorous, but tender and soft, a smile of authorial happiness.5

  After a few days Anton had to return to Babkino. He was keeping Kolia under guard, while helping Dr Arkhangelsky with a study of Russia’s psychiatric institutions – work that would bear fictional fruit five years later. At the end of July Kolia broke free. Schechtel reported from Moscow:

  We had a heart-to-heart and finally he admitted that he has to abandon his ‘big slag’ and that this is the only way of burning his boats and, … after giving his appearance, very bedraggled recently, a gentlemanly veneer, to re-enter society … That same evening blood gushed, real blood, there’s no doubt about it, I saw him spit it. The next day was worse – today he’s sent a note; he asks me to send a doctor, he’s bleeding to death.

  Anton did not rush to Moscow, but Kolia was moved to the Korneev house after promising not to infest it with fleas. Anton stayed at Babkino until September, picking gooseberries, raspberries and mushrooms. Inspired by the south, needing money from New Times, he wrote his stories of the steppes. Other pursuits were out of the question, he told Schechtel: ‘I could devour a whorelet like Nadia [Ianova] … In Babkino there’s still nobody to screw. So much work that there’s no time even for a quiet fart.’6

  In September Moscow’s writers returned to their desks. Palmin boasted of implausible amorous adventures on the Volga. Anton had no love affairs to ponder. His third and last story inspired by the steppes, ‘Panpipes’, evoked the doomed rivers and forests of the Don basin, and irritated critics who wanted more humanity, morality and plots in fiction. Mikhailovsky, the Northern Herald’s purveyor of opinions to the intelligentsia, went for Anton’s collection, In the Twilight, which Suvorin had just published in book form:

  Questions without answers, answers without questions, stories with no beginning or end, plots with no dénouement … Mr Chekhov should turn on his work lamp in his study to light up these half-lit characters and dispel the gloom that conceals their silhouette
s and contours.

  A man whom there were few to praise, worried by debt and by his brothers, Anton fell into gloom.

  Notes

  1 Cut from A. S. Suvorin, Dnevnik: quoted in V. Lakshin, Proval in Teatr, 1987, 4, 83–91; more extensively in Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1995, No. 15, 147–51.

  2 See OR, 331 82 2: Aleksandr’s letters to Masha, 1883–7: 28 Apr. 1887.

  3 See OR, 331 82 17: Nikolai’s letter to Masha, 1887.

  4 In Taganrog cousin George was working for a third Tchaikovsky brother, Ippolit (the fat, heterosexual Tchaikovsky who told jokes), director of the shipping company there.

  5 See N. M. Ezhov Aleksei Sergeevich Suvorin, Moi vospominaniia o niom, dumy i soobrazhenia in Istoricheskii vestnik, SPb, 1915, 1, 110–38.

  6 Cut from PSSP: see OR, 331 22 14: Anton’s letters to Schechtel 1886–1902; 4 June 1887. The passage was inked out by Schechtel.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Ivanov in Moscow

  September 1887–January 1888

  IN SEPTEMBER 1887 Anton wrote a letter apparently so suicidal that Aleksandr destroyed it, responding:

  You write that you’re alone, have nobody to talk or to write to … I deeply sympathize with all my heart and soul, for I am no happier than you … One thing in your letter I can’t understand: lamenting that you hear and read only lies and more lies, petty, but endless. What I can’t understand is why you’re hurt by it and driven to moral vomiting by an overdose of vileness. Undoubtedly you’re a clever decent person, don’t you realize that in our age everything lies? … I don’t deserve the order of St Anna [his sick and unloved wife, Anna, and a civil service award], but it’s hung round my neck and I wear it workdays and holidays.

  The answer, Aleksandr told his brother, was to move to Petersburg, but Anton now found Petersburg repellent. Suvorin was still in the country, mourning, while the ‘Zulus’ as Anton dubbed the journalists of New Times, were lambasting Darwin or Nadson. He salved his conscience by fancying that he and his brother counterbalanced the reactionaries. Suvorin saw no conflict, saying: ‘Chekhov did not condemn New Times’ political programme, but angrily argued with me about Jews … If New Times helped Chekhov to get on his feet, then it is good that New Times existed …’1 Suvorin never doubted that his affection for Anton was reciprocated: ‘If Chekhov loved me, he did so for something serious, far more serious than money,’ he was to say to Doroshevich. Nevertheless, Suvorin did not always shield Anton from his underlings’ attacks, even if he sometimes defended Anton against them: ‘Chekhov is a very independent writer and a very independent man … I have facts from his literary life to prove what a straight, good and independent man he is.’2

  Other Petersburgers irritated Anton. He wrote less for Fragments: Leikin and Bilibin bored him, whining about each other – hen-pecked Bilibin’s anaemia and anorexia; Leikin’s deviousness, obesity and hysterical fits. Babkino, not least Aleksei Kiseliov’s sexual frustration, was also becoming tedious.

  Anton was short of money too. For 150 roubles he sold the Verner brothers, typographically Moscow’s most innovative printers, the rights to fourteen of his comic stories; he was waiting for Suvorin to market a more substantial book. In Russia in the 1880s it was more profitable to write full-length plays: a playwright received two per cent of the gross takings for each act of a play. To be performed in the State theatres, a play had to pass many hurdles. In Moscow there was one reputable private theatre: Korsh’s. Lily Markova had acted there, as had Daria Musina-Pushkina, Masha’s friend. Chekhov made fun of a ‘preposterous’ drama at Korsh’s theatre. Korsh challenged him: ‘Why don’t you write a play yourself?’ Korsh’s actors told Chekhov he would write well: ‘You know how to get on people’s nerves.’3 Chekhov agreed to write a play, and then join the Russian Society of Dramatists and Operatic Composers.

  Chekhov’s title, Ivanov, was a clever ploy. Ivanov is a surname as common in Russia as Smith in England, and the play could bring one per cent of the population to see their namesake. Ivanov, a bright intellectual (we are told), spends all four acts of the play in manic depression. The Jewish girl he has married and cut off from family and religion is dying of TB; he falls for the daughter of his creditors. Self-hate overcomes him. For the Korsh theatre Ivanov at least had melodramatic curtain falls: Act 2 ends with the sick wife catching her husband embracing his new love; Act 3 ends with his telling her the doctor’s prognosis, and the play ends with the hero’s death – by heart attack and later, Chekhov decided, by bullet. Modern audiences are more enthralled by Ivanov’s conflicts with the priggish doctor who denounces him and the evil steward who eggs him on – three central male figures suggesting one multiple personality. Chekhov himself saw the play as charting a mental disease, but he was to baffle actors who wanted to know only whether Ivanov is villain or victim? Chekhov bemused them by subtitling the play ‘Comedy’.

  Ivanov, his ‘dramatic miscarriage’, was written in ten days. Chekhov shut his study door and upset Nikolai Ezhov by his ‘pensive, taciturn, somehow disgruntled’ mien. Ezhov was the first outsider to read the play out: Chekhov listened with detachment. Ezhov praised it to Chekhov’s face, but privately reacted ‘with amazement, since instead of the expected cheerful comedy in the Chekhov genre I found a gloomy drama crammed with depressing episodes … Ivanov seemed unconvincing.’4 Chekhov was happy: the play was: ‘light as a feather, without a single longueur. An unprecedented plot’. Korsh liked it too, and Davydov, who was to play the lead part, kept Chekhov up until three in the morning, enthusing. Twenty years on, he wrote: ‘I don’t recall any other work captivating me like this. It was as clear as anything that I was seeing a major playwright laying new paths.’5

  The first performance on 19 November 1887 launched Chekhov as a dramatist. He had produced something ‘big’, ‘serious’, though – as he saw himself – unpolished. Leikin was a mean-spirited and uncalled-for mentor: he slandered Davydov, and told Chekhov to stay away from rehearsals. The first night went awry: Chekhov was aghast. Only Davydov and Glama, who played Sarra, knew their parts, and the minor actors were drunk. Nevertheless the audience applauded and the author took three curtain calls, though the finale with Ivanov’s coincidental heart attack at his second wedding bewildered them. For the second performance four days later, Chekhov tinkered with this act. Piotr Kicheev, the literally murderous editor who had never forgiven Anton for deserting The Dragonfly‚ went for the jugular: ‘deeply immoral, cynical rubbish … the author is a pathetic slanderer of the ideals of his time. [Ivanov is] not a hero of the times we live in, but just an outright blackguard, trampling on all laws, God’s and man’s.’ Surrounded by beer bottles and duck dung, Palmin wrote to Leikin: ‘In all the scenes there is nothing comic and nothing dramatic, just horrible, disgusting cynical filth, which creates a revolting impression.’

  Ivanov had one more performance in Korsh’s theatre. Critics praised it only enough to ensure that the play toured the provinces. For 400 roubles Chekhov endured embarrassment which coloured his attitude to the theatre. Disapproval incited in him a love-hate relationship with drama; he would respond with plays that were time bombs for stage conventions and poison for actors. The more he was lectured on conventions, the more he would flout them. In the failure of Ivanov lie the seeds of the success of Uncle Vania.

  Chekhov was to flee the city after almost every new production of his plays. Four days after the third performance of Ivanov, he went to Petersburg. He brought Ivanov for Suvorin to read. This time, however, he slummed with Aleksandr and his family, all recuperating from typhoid. Aleksandr’s life outdid Ivanov’s: Anna, facing death, missing her eldest son and her daughter, was jealous of Aleksandr, who thought only of sexual frustration. Aleksandr’s household, despite two servants and the salary that Suvorin paid him, was sunk in filth and poverty; the two infant boys were retarded, locked in a world of their own. Anton wrote home, as his own high-minded character in Ivanov, Dr Lvov, might have written: ‘Anna is ill (tuberculosis). Filth, stench
, weeping, lying; stay a week with Aleksandr and you’ll go crazy and get as filthy as a floor-rag.’

  After three days he left for the Leikins, to wash, sleep and relax. From Leikin he moved to the Hotel Moskva. Living in luxury among strangers, he could make women friends, but he was also freer to make new men friends. In St Petersburg he acquired two more lifelong acolytes, as he had previously acquired Ezhov and Gruzinsky. One was Ivan Leontiev-Shcheglov, the grandson of an army general, who wrote as Shcheglov (‘Goldfinch’), following the fable by Krylov: ‘Better to sing well as a little goldfinch, Than badly as a nightingale.’ The other was Kazimir Barantsevich, a ticket inspector on Petersburg’s trams, who had six children and spent his nights writing. Pathologically modest, Barantsevich had no mirrors in his house. He wrote about heroes with lives even grimmer than his own: but for Chekhov, he would never have left Petersburg.

  Bilibin, Shcheglov and Barantsevich in Petersburg, Gruzinsky and Ezhov in Moscow, were not just friends and admirers; they were horrible warnings of the price of failure for a Russian intellectual. Trapped by bad luck, poverty or mediocrity into being part-time writers, they seemed to Anton like animals in a menagerie. As Vagner, a zoologist, would tell Anton, they saw Chekhov as the elephant in the zoo. Their admiration became envy only when the elephant broke out of the zoo. The other animals stayed caged, dispirited, cannibalistic. It was Suvorin, the kindly keeper who fed and doctored the menagerie, who singled out Anton for release, raising his payments from 12 to 20 kopecks a line, allowing Chekhov more space, preparing to launch him in the ‘thick’ literary journals. By 1888 Chekhov would enjoy the freedom to write as he wanted, and was distinct from the caged literary animal. As Chekhov reported to his family on 3 December 1887, Suvorin was enthusiastic about Ivanov: ‘Everyone is waiting for me to put the play on in Petersburg and is confident of success, but after Moscow I am so repelled by my play that I can’t possibly make myself think about it: I can’t be bothered …’