Today at 4.15 a.m. Anna died. Knoch will do the autopsy tonight. After the funeral I shall immediately take the children to Auntie in Moscow and will join you in Sumy. Then we’ll talk it all over. Be well for now. Regards. Yours, A. Chekhov.
Notes
1 See OR, 331 82 9: Anna Sokolnikova’s letter to Evgenia Chekhova, 20 Jan. 1888.
2 The two writers had exchanged only a few words at an evening gathering a few days previously; Chekhov and Garshin’s mother had taken to each other, when Chekhov visited the bookshop belonging to Evgeni Garshin, the writer’s brother – a critic who became very hostile to Chekhov.
TWENTY-FOUR
Travel and Travails
May–September 1888
THE LINTVARIOVS were very unlike the Kiseliovs. The Kiseliovs had the rakishness and the loftiness of the nobility; the Lintvariovs were principled gentry, hardworking landowners and good employers, radicals ready for self-sacrifice. All they had in common with the Kiseliovs was impecuniousness.
The head of the Lintvariov family was the mother, Aleksandra. She had five adult children, three daughters and two sons. The eldest daughter, Zinaida, impressed Chekhov. He told Suvorin:
A doctor, she is the pride of the family, and the peasants say, a saint … She has a brain tumour; this has left her completely blind, she has epilepsy and constant headaches. She knows what to expect, and talks about her imminent death stoically with striking calm … here, seeing a blind woman on the terrace laughing, joking or listening to my In the Twilight being read, I start to think it odd not that the doctor will die but that we don’t sense our own death.
The second daughter, Elena, plain and assumed unmarriageable, was also a doctor. Natalia, the youngest, was full of song and laughter: she identified with the peasantry, and not only spoke but also taught Ukrainian (then forbidden). The elder son, Pavel, under house arrest for radical activities, was married and expecting his first child. The youngest son, George was a pianist, enthralled by Tchaikovsky’s music and Tolstoy’s morality: his career was also curtailed by political activism. Letters sent to Luka, even to Chekhov, were intercepted by the secret police. The Lintvariovs expected intellectuals to devote themselves to the people. Discussions at Luka, despite Natalia’s vivacity, had little of Babkino’s frivolity. There were no drinking bouts, no romps with peasant girls. The innocent ambience and idyllic setting were to infiltrate a few of Chekhov’s works, notably The Wood Demon, and give them a Utopian colouring.
The house the Chekhovs rented was more habitable than Misha had suggested, despite four dogs that chased the Lintvariov pigs around the yard and burst into the guests’ dining room. A Polish girl cooked for the Chekhovs; Evgenia refused to cook, because the kitchen was occupied by another holiday-maker. Anton went fishing and struck up a partnership with a local factory-worker, a keen fisherman. They fished the millponds on the Psiol. The miller’s daughter was plump ‘like a sultana pudding … such concupiscence, Heaven help me,’ Anton wrote to Kiseliov, but gentlemen at Luka did not seduce peasant girls, and Anton was dismayed to discover that Sumy had no brothel. Luka also lacked lavatories: Chekhov’s bottom was covered with mosquito bites.
None of the visitors who trekked 400 miles, a thirty-hour train journey, complained. The Ukraine appealed to Russian intellectuals, who felt a yearning for a Shangri-La they could idealize, like the Victorian English love affair with Scotland. Anton’s newest acolytes – the writers Ivan Shcheglov, Kazimir Barantsevich, and the flautist Aleksandr Ivanenko – and those whom he revered happily joined him for two weeks at Luka. On 20 May the poet Pleshcheev arrived. Ivanenko played duets with Georges Lintvariov; the local girls rowed Pleshcheev on the Psiol and sang romances to him, Anton monitoring the old poet’s pulse and breathing.
Early in June two of Anton’s brothers, Vania and Kolia, came. Kolia was subdued, for in Moscow he had vanished with Franz Schechtel’s money and materials; Schechtel, as architect for a church that Kolia was helping to restore, was facing a fine of 150 roubles for each day’s delay. ‘I pity myself in the extreme,’ he wrote. ‘Kolia is not worth pitying.’ Aleksandr came to Moscow and left his infant sons with Aunt Fenichka. There, Gruzinsky reported on 21 June, order had disintegrated: ‘On the steps of your apartment I saw a charming young maid with a charming young man on her knees (usually it’s the other way round).’1 Aleksandr hurried to Sumy, but was quarrelsome and drunk. He mounted the stage of the little Sumy summer theatre and helped the hypnotist and the conjurors: the audience laughed, but Anton removed him. Then Aleksandr wrote a proposal of marriage to Elena Lintvariova, presuming her desperate enough to accept a widowed alcoholic with two retarded sons. Anton tore the letter up. Aleksandr stalked off to the station at two in the morning. In Moscow he accused Aunt Fenichka of poisoning his children. He took them to the Petersburg flat, which had been stripped bare by two dismissed servant girls, and there lapsed into alcoholic stupor. (Some time elapsed before the two little boys were rescued and sent for a few weeks to Aunt Fenichka in Moscow.)
Kolia and Pleshcheev left two days after Aleksandr walked out. Kolia, after a third-class journey cramped among the household goods of other returning holiday-makers, went to his sick-bed in Anna Ipatieva-Golden’s house: from here he tried to extort money from Suvorin to illustrate ‘Steppe’. Pleshcheev returned (forgetting his nightshirt) first-class to his genteel apartment in Petersburg. The gap was filled by Misha, back from Taganrog, who now felt closer to Mitrofan’s family than his own, particularly to his cousin Georgi.
Anton thought of buying a ranch in the Ukraine for a few thousand roubles. There, he fantasized, he could write, found a spa for other city writers, and practise medicine. Earning 500 to 1000 roubles from each new story or play, Anton could be a man of property. A farmer friend of the Lintvariovs, Aleksandr Smagin, had taken a fancy to Masha, and offered to help find Anton a property near his own estate in Poltava. The Lintvariovs harnessed four horses to their antiquated carriage: Anton with Natalia Lintvariova, her brother George and a girl from Poltava set off to the Smagin estate. Anton started a ten-day tour of the market towns of the northern Ukraine that Gogol had made famous fifty years before. For three years Anton considered properties, but every deal fell through. The 250-mile tour left Chekhov a lover of all things Ukrainian. When he returned to Sumy he was buoyant.
Nightingales hatched their young in the window frame. More visitors came. Anton had asked Gavrilov to give Pavel two weeks’ leave from the warehouse. Gavrilov was happy to employ the father of a famous man: his demands on Pavel were nominal, though Pavel liked helping Gavrilov reckon his million-rouble annual profit. On 26 June Pavel arrived, to celebrate his name day jointly with Pavel Lintvariov, an event that contributed touches to Chekhov’s story ‘The Name-Day Party’. Of the acolytes, only Kazimir Barantsevich came for long. He and Anton caught crayfish together. Barantsevich left, forgetting his waders and a pair of trousers. He wrote a thank-you letter: ‘Not a day passes without my thinking about suicide (except for my short stay with you).’
Anton missed Suvorin. Sending Anton his comedy The Theatrical Sparrow for comment, Shcheglov said the same: ‘I occasionally have Suvorin-schmerzen; it’s so wonderful to talk to him now and then – he is sensitivity itself.’ After three days by train and boat, on 13 July 1888, Anton was greeted by the Suvorins at their villa in Feodosia. For nine days they bathed, lay in the sun, strolled and talked. Anton wrote neither letters nor fiction: the relationship absorbed him totally. Here they sketched out the play that would later become The Wood Demon. Anna Suvorina watched:
We lay on the baking-hot sand or on moonlit nights watched the boundless sea … My husband and Anton when they were together chatted or exchanged stories all the time … We introduced Anton to Aivazovsky [the painter] … Aivazovsky’s beautiful second wife, an Armenian wore a white housecoat and her long black hair, still wet after bathing, flowed loose; lit by the moon she was sorting out roses, freshly picked and strewn over the table, into baskets. Anton said ‘It�
��s a magic fairy tale.’
Chekhov wrote nothing that summer, although he was planning a novel. Suvorin’s munificence overwhelmed him: rowing boats for fishing on the Psiol, money to buy an estate, a daughter, a partnership in the publishing business, co-authorship for a new play, worldly wisdom, state secrets. Anton made light of Suvorin’s offer of his eleven-year-old daughter Nastia, and borrowed a sum too small to embarrass himself, but large enough not to offend Suvorin.
Anton ignored everything else. In Moscow Vania was searching for quarters for himself and Pavel. The Korneev house was a shambles. Vania told his mother:
There is a lot of dust and rubbish from well-known persons in your apartment, but what there really are a lot of are cats. For want of anything to do, Auntie talks to them, feeding the poor animals on buns and milk, all the pussy cats have names, the littlest is called Paper Bag.
At 4.00 a.m. on 23 July 1888, Anton set sail with Aleksei Suvorin junior, the Dauphin, for the Caucasus. In heavy seas Anton lost his footing and grabbed the telegraph machine to stop his fall. In the confusion on the bridge the ship, the Dir, narrowly missed another boat.2 Anton and the Dauphin set off across Georgia for the Caspian sea, aiming to reach Persia via Bukhara. A new disaster struck Suvorin. The Dauphin had telegrams: his third brother, Valerian, was ill. Valerian had turned up, complaining of headaches, at Zvenigorod, where Anton would have been working, had he accepted Kiseliov’s invitation to Babkino. Here Anton’s colleague, Dr Arkhangelsky, diagnosed diphtheria and ordered a trachæotomy. A call to a Moscow surgeon went astray: Valerian died in Zvenigorod on 2 August 1888.
The Dauphin and Anton raced back to the Crimea. Suvorin junior hastened to his father. Anton avoided the bereaved Suvorins and returned to the Lintvariovs and the river Psiol. The Dauphin wrote to Anton on 12 August 1888:
I found our father completely shattered and tired, as if after an attack of mental illness … Now everything seems impossible, futile … My father is trying to follow common-sense prescriptions, trying to live ‘a normal life’, is doing the bookshop accounts, going to the building site … We expected you here, I did my best to make excuses for you.
Appeals for compassion came from Moscow as well as the Crimea. Aunt Fenichka wrote to her sister on 11 August:
I grieve for the children now that Anna is no more and I wake up at night and think about them … I can’t bear it, when the child [little Kolia] misses his mother.’ He can’t talk and told me – he shows me with his hands – how mama was dressed and put in the coffin and then buried in a hole in the ground, shows me with his hands and simply I have never known such grief; I just cannot calm myself. Anna was a dear and I was quite certain that her relatives would take them in and not let them live like this. I pray that Our Father in Heaven will soften Anton’s heart … poor Shura [Anna’s 16-year-old son] cried a lot for his mother and fell unconscious, and the daughter [the eleven-year-old Nadia] cried a lot.
Anton could not cope with any more demands on his sympathy, his living space, or his purse. His nephews, for whom he felt scarcely more affection than did Pavel, were abandoned to their drunken father, and Suvorin to his wife and surviving sons.
Since ‘Steppe’ in March Chekhov had not maintained his reputation. He was ashamed of ‘Lights’, his second story, which was to appear in The Northern Herald. (He excluded it from his collected works.) Inspired by revisiting Taganrog, it tells the story of a successful provincial who returns to the seaside town where he grew up. The local girls pine for the boys who abandoned them for the metropolis: they endure loveless marriages. The narrator seduces a girl, Kisochka, whom he once revered. The work to which Anton devoted most thought but which never saw the light of day was an unwritten novel. The hints that survive in others’ recollections and Anton’s letters suggest that it was based on the life of the Lintvariovs. Perhaps it was recycled into The Wood Demon and the stories which Chekhov wrote, when inspiration returned, in the autumn. The company of writers all summer had left Anton so irritated, and the suffering of others weighed so heavily that his novel was abandoned.
Physically and spiritually exhausted, but desperate to write, Anton returned to Luka. On 2 September 1888 he and his family returned to the Korneev house in Moscow, evicting Aunt Fenichka (who returned to her cramped quarters) and her stray cats and dogs.
Notes
1 See OR, 331 49 42a: A. Lazarev-Gruzinsky’s letters to Anton, 1887–8.
2 That same autumn the Dir was wrecked on the shores of the Crimea.
TWENTY-FIVE
The Prize
October–December 1888
BACK IN HIS STUDY, Chekhov began a busy autumn. The house was noisier: Seriozha Kiseliov stamped upstairs when he came back from school. There was now a family retainer, the cook Mariushka Dormidontovna Belenovskaia, already over sixty, who would serve Anton for the rest of his life.
The protests about Kolia’s dereliction were loud. Early in October 1888 Schechtel (who had suffered financially) voiced to Anton everyone’s thoughts:
That Kolia is feeling bad, and very bad, is obvious – I wouldn’t give tuppence for his life expectancy. I can positively affirm that he is incorrigible. With tears in his eyes he assured me that he could see and sense the evil which his Big Slag [Anna Golden] causes him, that from this instant he is breaking with her forever, he will see people, dine, lunch, work. Excellent: I almost believed him; for a few days he behaved just like the Kolia of old, he came to see us every day. Apart from a little glass of Sauternes he drank nothing. Whom he was trying to deceive, I now can’t understand. The other side of the coin: constant vodka, salami (Luxus) and Slag [Anna] every day. No inclination to work. He fancied the idea of painting my wife’s portrait. All right – a mass of money has been spent – I don’t know what will happen; so far the canvas is standing in a virginal state.
Three weeks later, Schechtel said, Kolia had taken 100 roubles and an iconostasis: ‘He definitely suffers from a mania which lets him see all his actions, some criminal, through rose-coloured glasses … I’m sorry to bother you, but what can I do? … Return the inconostasis to my messenger.’
The next warning came in a note from the landlord, Dr Korneev, to Misha:
Tell me where your brother the artist Kolia is sleeping. Today there was an incident. I caught a fellow looking into your windows. As a vigilant landlord I gave the lad a fright … He admitted he was Kolia, that he’d taken a room in Medvedev’s lodgings and, he said, he didn’t know where he’d spent the nights for three weeks and he had no papers! I tell you in such detail in case there’s trouble and you have to pay a fine.1
Chekhov appealed to Suvorin’s son-in-law and legal expert, Kolomnin, to see if Kolia could get a certificate of exemption from military service. The crime of having hidden was inexpiable; none of Kolomnin’s suggestions would save Kolia. Schechtel persisted in salvaging. At the end of November he wrote:
I sent two telegrams to the Big Slag – no answer. Clearly, he’s not there. Has he been to see you? Just let him give me back the boards – I don’t want anything else. Why does he punish me twice over! Perhaps he’ll sort himself out and work; I am ready to forget everything if only he’d work.
Through Aleksandr in Petersburg, Anton traced Kolia to a new woman. Not until the approach of Easter 1889, did the family hear from their black sheep again.
After he had left Sumy in a huff, Aleksandr twice wrote to Masha asking secretly whether he might marry Elena Lintvariova. Masha told Anton, who defended a vulnerable colleague and comrade, as he always felt Elena to be, from his brother. He told Aleksandr:
Above all, you are an 84o proof hypocrite. You write ‘I want a family, music, affection, kind words when I’m tired after … running round fires etc.’ … you well know that family, music, affection and kind words come not from marriage to the first woman you meet, even if she is very decent, but from love … you know Elena less than the man on the moon … As for Elena, she is a doctor, a landowner, free, independent, educated and has h
er own views. She may decide to get married of course, for she is just a woman, but she won’t get married for a million roubles if there is no love on her part.
Aleksandr capitulated. Suvorin set aside his own misery and remonstrated with Aleksandr. Aleksandr remained for some months, under Suvorin’s influence, sober.
Soon, Aleksandr found ‘affection’ for himself and a mother for his sons. Natalia Golden, Anton’s old love Natashevu, re-entered the Chekhov circle. Aleksandr’s letter to Anton of 24 October 1888 had a sting in the tail: ‘Natalia is living in my apartment, running the household, fussing over the children and keeping me up to scratch. And if she crosses sometimes into concubinage, that’s not your business.’
New Times had printed an article on the dying Putiata. Into the office came Natalia to ask where Putiata was living. (Her sister Anastasia was Putiata’s estranged wife.)
We got chatting. I invited her to visit and have a look at my boys. She agreed, visited and after a few evenings spent between ‘the widower and the maid’ the end result is that we are living together. She has one room, I have the other. We live, we curse each other from morning to night, but our relationship is entirely conjugal. She fits me like a glove. If our parents, whose old age I intend to console by exemplary behaviour, don’t view this ‘intimacy’ as incest, fornication and onanism, then I have nothing against marriage in church.
Anton Chekhov Page 22
