Anton Chekhov

by Donald Rayfield

  Chekhov’s success in Petersburg was crowned by the wide popularity of his latest stories in New Times. The story of starving cattle, ‘Cold Blood’, based on a miserable business failure of a Taganrog cousin, won Anton an accolade from the Petersburg Society for the Protection of Animals. ‘The Kiss’, set in an artillery regiment (officers like those Chekhov invented for Three Sisters), won admiration from the military. The hero is a shy officer, kissed in the dark by a woman who mistakes him for someone else and whose identity he never discovers. Chekhov had studied the battalion in Voskresensk so well that his readers believed he must be a serving officer. The greatest sensation, however, was aroused by ‘Kashtanka’, the story of a dog, conscripted into a circus, that recognizes his owner in the audience. It was the first Chekhov story to be published as a book.

  Anton’s public was now far wider than the New Times readership. Suvorin now needed him more than vice versa. Other grand old men took a liking to Chekhov. One was the aristocratic radical, Aleksei Pleshcheev, who had mounted the scaffold with Dostoevsky, and still wrote an occasional inspirational civic poem. Pleshcheev was for his remaining years Chekhov’s most perspicacious critic. Like Suvorin, Pleshcheev hinted that he would like Anton as a son-in-law, but Anton returned, unbetrothed, to Moscow on 17 December. Bilibin wrote his greetings for New Year 1888: ‘Gruzinsky tells me that you are radiating all the colours of the rainbow after your Petersburg impressions.’

  On Suvorin’s advice, and to appease the censorship, Chekhov revised Ivanov. He now called the play a ‘drama’, but Act IV was intractable: How could Ivanov die a convincing death?

  Notes

  1 From a draft of a letter in 1904 to the writer Doroshevich, quoted in PSSP, 2, 401–2.

  2 From Suvorin’s letter of the late 1880s to his leader-writer Diakov, quoted in PSSP, 2, 401.

  3 See M. P. Chekhov’s memoirs; also P. A. Sergeenko, O. Chekhove, in Niva, 1904, 10, 217–18.

  4 See RGALI, 189 1 2: Ezhov’s draft Humorists of the 1880s; quoted in PSSP, XI, 412–13.

  5 See Davydov’s Koe-chto o Chekhove, quoted in PSSP, XI, 414.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The Death of Anna

  January–May 1888

  CHEKHOV ALLOCATED all January 1888 to a masterpiece, ‘Steppe’ The Northern Herald’s editor Evreinova (who reminded Anton of a ‘roast starling’), had given him carte blanche on length, subject, and fee. Chekhov had 500 roubles as an advance and another 500 on publication for a story of 120 pages. His income was trebled: never again did the Chekhov family know penury, though they sometimes spent more than they earned. The Northern Herald was not censored: Anton was free. The pressure of weekly or fortnightly stories for three Petersburg journals receded: he fed New Times, but starved Fragments and The Petersburg Newspaper.

  ‘Steppe’ flaunts all conventions for extended prose: instead of a plot, we have a boy’s journey across the Ukraine, from Taganrog to Kiev, accompanied first by a friendly priest, Khristofor, then by carters, and encountering a cross-section of humanity – an embittered Jew, a Polish countess, peasants rebellious and submissive. Nature – ponds, insects, a storm – overwhelms the boy’s mind: he succumbs to a fever. The work has a musical structure: it is a symphony, with a storm and a pastorale as haunting as those in Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony. Spellbound by memories of his own childhood in the steppes, Chekhov also had Gogol’s ‘Sorochintsy Fair’ and Turgenev’s prose poetry in mind as bench marks. ‘Steppe’, unmatched until Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’, is the first work by Chekhov that we can call a classic.

  Pleshcheev read the manuscript in ecstasy. In February 1889 it was published. It left musicians, painters and writers awe-struck: Vsevolod Garshin, the most original of younger prose-writers, had met his peer. Critics, notably Ostrovsky (the playwright’s brother) risked their necks in praise. Suvorin, Aleksandr reported, ‘left his tea undrunk. Anna Suvorina brought him three fresh cups when I was there’. Suvorin’s cronies, however, distanced themselves. Aleksandr passed on the comments of Burenin, the New Times journalist who was most trusted by Suvorin:

  Such descriptions of the steppe as yours he has read only in Gogol and Tolstoy. The storm that gathers and does not burst is the height of perfection. The characters, except for the yids, are alive. But you don’t know how to write long stories … ‘Steppe’ is the beginning, or rather the prologue, of a big piece you will write.

  Leikin tried to dispirit Chekhov: ‘Hanging is too good for those who advised you to write long pieces. A long piece is good when it’s a novel or tale with a plot, a beginning and an end … Anyway, I stopped reading about 25 pages before the end.’

  Unlike his experience with Ivanov, Anton was sociable and cheerful all the time he was writing ‘Steppe’, although he wondered at his story, almost unique in his work for its lack of love interest. ‘I can’t do without women!’ he exclaimed in a letter to Shcheglov.

  He found two days to write a melodramatic short story, ‘Sleepy’, about a skivvy who murders her mistress’s baby so that she can sleep (a story that Katherine Mansfield would later plagiarize). He threw off two short plays, the Beckett-like monologue for a superannuated actor alone in the theatre, Kalkhas, later called Swansong, and the first of his fine farces. The Bear, which he later dubbed The Milch-Cow for its profitability. Friends noted Chekhov’s soaring self-esteem, and other changes: his flowing hair, and quizzical smile. Gruzinsky wrote to Ezhov in February 1888: ‘Chekhov really looks like Anton Rubinstein … a coolness has sprung up between Bilibin and Chekhov.’ Bilibin stopped signing himself ‘Your Victorina’, but Anton’s new friend, Ivan Shcheglov, became more affectionate: ‘No Frenchwoman can caress so seductively as you can.’

  Friends still called on Anton’s medical skills. Grigorovich, after Chekhov had examined him, decided to stave off death in Nice: from there he sent Chekhov ideas for stories. From Petersburg Aleksandr issued desolate bulletins about Anna. Surgeons and doctors disagreed. Aleksandr was tormented by temptation as well as remorse – the secretary at New Times had soft black eyes. He asked Anton for moral guidance. Anna’s terror of death overcame her inhibitions: she pleaded with her mother-in-law:

  I beg you, take pity on your grandchildren, come to Petersburg and stay with us. I’ve been ill for a long time and now the doctors think I must have an operation, that I have an abscess or echinococci [bacteria] (ask Anton he will explain) on the liver and I have to have them cut out. God knows how the operation will end, but I’m terribly afraid and at best I shall have to be in hospital for a long time. Who will be with my children then? … If I had fallen ill in Moscow I wouldn’t be so afraid, but here I’m utterly alone and I am so miserable. Do me one more favour, light a candle to the martyr St Panteleimon for me in the chapel and pray to the Healer for me. My regards to Pavel Chekhov and ask him to say a prayer … I thank Anton for his sympathy …1

  Botkin, the most distinguished surgeon in Petersburg, examined Anna. There was a brief remission, but by 4 March it was clear that she was dying of tuberculosis of the liver.

  Kolia’s existence was also threatened not just by disease but by the authorities, for he had evaded conscription. All communications, even from his brothers, went via Anna Ipatieva-Golden. Putiata, Anastasia Golden’s first husband, and virtually a brother-in-law, was destitute and dying: Anton felt obliged to offer him treatment and money. The indigent and importunate spoilt Anton’s mood. He wanted to go back to Petersburg so badly that, after Lucullian nights together, he shared a train compartment with Leikin. He told his brother Misha that March:

  I had a bad journey, thanks to Leikin the chatterbox. He wouldn’t let me read, eat or sleep. All the time the bastard boasted and pestered me with questions. As soon as I drop off he touches my foot and asks, ‘Did you know that my ‘Bride of Christ’ has been translated into Italian?

  At the Hotel Moskva Pleshcheev, Shcheglov and Anton’s new editor, Evreinova, were waiting. The next day he moved in with the Suvorins, with mixed feelings, as he
suggested to Misha:

  A grand piano, a harmonium, a divan with a bustle, Vasili the footman, a bed, fireplace, a chic desk – these are my conveniences. As for the inconveniences, they are beyond counting. For a start, I am deprived of the chance of coming home under the influence and in female company … before dinner a long talk with Mme Suvorina about how she hates humanity and her buying today a jacket for 120 roubles.

  After dinner a talk about migraine, then the kids can’t take their eyes off me and wait for me to say something unusually clever. They think I’m a genius because I wrote the story of Kashtanka. The Suvorins have named [after the animals in the story] one dog Fiodor Timofeich, another Auntie and a third Ivan Ivanych.

  From dinner to tea we have pacing of Suvorin’s study from corner to corner and philosophy; the spouse interrupts the conversation out of turn and puts on a bass voice or imitates a barking hound.

  Tea. At tea we talk about medicine. Finally I’m free, sit in my study and can’t hear voices. Tomorrow I’m running away for the whole day: I shall be with Pleshcheev … By the way I have my own loo and back door – if I didn’t I might as well lie down and die. My Vasili is dressed better than me, has a genteel physiognomy and I find it strange that he walks reverently on tiptoe around me and tries to anticipate my wishes.

  On the whole it’s awkward being a man of literature.

  I want to sleep but my hosts go to bed at 3 a.m.

  Anton called on Aleksandr: he was amazed to find the children fed and clean, and his brother sober. Anton climbed endless stairs to see Vsevolod Garshin. Garshin was out.2

  After one week, Anton took the train to Moscow, unaware that on 19 March 1888, in a fit of depression, Vsevolod Garshin had killed himself by hurling himself down the stairs Anton had climbed. Ever since his traumatic experiences as a soldier in the Turkish wars twelve years before, Garshin had distilled his madness into stories of obsession, such as ‘The Red Flower’. Marriage to Russia’s only woman psychiatrist did not save him. Garshin’s funeral was as grotesque as his death: Leman, an author of a manual on billiards, usurped the ceremony with an inept oration; New Times, which scorned radical writers, was represented only by Aleksandr Chekhov. A quarrel over two commemorative books sucked Chekhov into literary politics. All that came of the controversy was that Chekhov got to know one significant contemporary, Korolenko, the literary lion of Nizhni Novgorod. Garshin’s prose of alienation was, however, to influence Anton’s later work.

  Spring made Anton yearn for the country, but Orthodox Easter was late that year – 24 April – and, Anton explained to Korolenko: ‘Anyone absent during the Easter holiday is considered by my household to be in mortal sin.’ He had many invitations: to explore the Volga with Korolenko, the far north with Leikin, or Constantinople with Suvorin. Babkino now palled. Was it proximity to importunate visitors, or boredom with prurient Aleksei Kiseliov and prudish Maria? In April, to soothe the Kiseliovs, Anton agreed to house their son Seriozha when he went to school in Moscow in the autumn, leaving him free to spend July in the Crimea at Suvorin’s new seaside house outside Feodosia, before setting out with Suvorin’s eldest son, ‘the Dauphin’, across the Black Sea to Georgia, and perhaps the Caspian to Central Asia. He would leave his family behind. The dacha he had in mind for them in May and June was in the Ukraine.

  Kolia’s friends at The Eastern Furnished Rooms, by the conservatoire, included two hapless musicians who were to become Anton’s companions. One, Ivanenko, had come to Moscow to study piano and found all the conservatoire pianos allocated; he took up the flute, and made forays into literature, signing himself ‘Little Ius’, a redundant letter in the Cyrillic alphabet. The other was the cellist Semashko, whose lugubrious playing was the butt of the Chekhovs’ jokes. Ivanenko and Semashko came from northeast Ukraine, near the town of Sumy. They put Anton in touch with the Lintvariov family, who, like the Kiseliovs, supplemented their income by renting summer cottages. Their estate, Luka, lay outside Sumy, on the river Psiol in hilly wooded countryside, warmer than Babkino, and even better for fishing.

  At Easter, Misha, on his way to Taganrog, was deputed to make a detour to Sumy and report on the Lintvariov estate. He recalled:

  After the stylishness of Babkino, Luka made a terribly mournful impression on me. The manor house was neglected, the courtyard had a puddle which seemed never to dry up, with the most enormous pigs wallowing in it and ducks swimming about, the park was more a wild, untended forest, and there were graves in it; the liberal Lintvariovs saw my student uniform and from the start treated me like a pariah.

  Anton had already invited half literary Petersburg to stay with him: he was not deterred. Pleshcheev intended to come, so did Suvorin, before taking Anton to the Crimea. Anton bought tackle: he and Suvorin would fish the Psiol together.

  Despite Aleksandr’s pleas, Anton refused to go to Anna’s bedside, and called him a ‘loathsome blackmailer’:

  Urgent medical help is required. If you won’t take Anna to Botkin then at least visit him yourself and explain what’s the matter … I doubt if mother will come, for her health is not all that good. And she has no passport. She has the same passport as papa, that would mean long discussions with father and going to the police chief etc.

  The family’s postscripts were no comfort: ‘Greetings!!!!! N. Chekhov. Mother grieves she can’t come.’ and: ‘My regards, I kiss you, Anna and the children, Masha.’ Aleksandr painted for Anton a picture of domestic hell:

  The children are running wild: howling, cowering, trying to get to their mother who either cries over them or chases them away. When I get home from the office, more trouble: she demands to see the vile woman I am going to marry, who intends to poison Kolia and Antosha for the sake of her own future children. She demands this woman be searched for behind the door, in the wardrobe, under the table … Just imagine the night, the ravings, the loneliness, the impossibility of consoling her, the crazy words, the sudden transitions from laughter to crying, the children crying in their sleep after being frightened all day. Judge, you Herod’s Æsculapius, what a time I’m having and what grief that mother won’t come.

  Aleksandr’s siblings showed more concern for strangers. Masha brought home a twelve-year-old boy she found begging. She and Anton gave him money, got him boots from the school where Vania worked, and gave the boy a train ticket to Iaroslavl and a letter to the local celebrity, the poet Trefolev (who looked ‘like a plucked crow’). Only Pavel softened to his son:

  Dear Aleksandr … I sympathize with your grief, but unfortunately can send you nothing, I can only pray, and I advise you to rely on God. He will arrange everything for the best. I wish Anna a Happy Easter and with all my heart a quick recovery, I ask her to forgive me and to forget the past … Your loving father, P. Chekhov.

  Anton was dreaming of catching perch-pike in the Psiol, ‘nobler and sweeter than making love’ he told Pleshcheev. Misha was with Uncle Mitrofan: ‘Mummy! I’m in Taganrog! happy, cheerful, calm, pleased.’

  Aleksandr despaired: ‘Anna’s days are numbered and the catastrophe is inevitable … Please ask our mother and her sister if they’ll take the children …’ But Anton was adamant in his refusal:

  If I add two rooms for the children, nurse and children’s junk, then the flat will cost 900 … Anyway, in any spacious flat we would be crowded. You know I have an agglomeration of adults living under one roof simply because, thanks to incomprehensible circumstances, we can’t go our own ways … There’s my mother, sister, the student Misha (who won’t leave even when he graduates), Kolia, who is doing nothing and has been jilted by his paramour, drinks and lies about undressed, our aunt and [her son] Aliosha (the latter two just use the accommodation). Add to this Vania hanging about from 3 p.m. to the early hours and all day on holidays, while papa comes for the evenings … These are all nice, cheerful people, but they are selfish, they make claims, they are usually talkative, they stamp about, they have no money … I refuse to take on anyone else, let alone somebody who has to be
brought up … Tear this letter up. You should make it a habit to tear up letters, they are scattered all over your apartment. Join us in the south in summer. It’s cheap.

  The children, Anton suggested, could be left with Aunt Fenichka, who would live in the Korneev house, while the Chekhovs were in the country. Aleksandr had to accept these brutal terms. Anton wrote far more mildly about his dependants to his ‘dear Captain’ Shcheglov on 18 April:

  I too have a ‘family circle’. For convenience I always take it with me like luggage and am as used to it as a growth on my forehead … it’s a benign, not a malignant growth … Anyway, I am more often cheerful than sad though, if I think about it, I am tied hand and foot.

  Evgenia worried only about her summer in the country, and wrote to Misha: ‘It’s a pity our dacha is not a success, it’s too late now, the luggage was sent at Easter … you wrote little about servants, what the prices are in Sumy, how much they’re paid a month.’

  On 7 May 1888 Anna took the last rites in Petersburg, while the Chekhovs reached Sumy by train and took a carriage two miles to Luka. Their hosts were friendly, the house comfortable, the weather hot and the setting unspoilt. ‘Misha was talking rubbish,’ Anton wrote, inviting Vania and Pavel to join them in 6 weeks’ time and bring vodka. He invited Shcheglov and wrote again to Vania specifying fish hooks. To Leikin he praised the civilized Ukrainian peasantry. Here, after the diseased and degraded peasants around Babkino, he could forget he was a doctor. Soon the Chekhovs were joined by guests. The arrival of the legendary Pleshcheev thrilled the Lintvariovs: for three weeks they treated him as a god. Belatedly Anton remembered his brothers. On 27 May he told Aleksandr to make Aunt Fenichka his children’s guardian, and not to pay Anna’s doctors: ‘If they are waiting for the autopsy to make a diagnosis, then their visits were absurd and the money they dare to take off you cries unto heaven … My regards to Anna and the kids.’ The next day, before this callous letter had arrived, Aleksandr sent Anton a note: