Anton Chekhov

by Donald Rayfield

  On 31 January 1889 the Petersburg première of Ivanov took place. It had, even its enemies admitted, great success. Davydov’s obesity expressed Ivanov’s moral paralysis. Russia’s unhappiest actress, Strepetova, put her suffering into Sarra. They brought the house down at the end of Act 3. Strepetova could not stop crying. Anton momentarily felt the cast were ‘kith and kin’. Modest Tchaikovsky, Bilibin, and Barantsevich were moved. Many proclaimed the play the equal of Griboedov’s or Gogol’s dramas. Some had doubts: Shcheglov’s diary noted ‘drafts blowing across the stage, the author’s inexperience and the absence of finish.’ Suvorin felt that Ivanov’s character never develops, that the women characters were sketchy – allegations which Anton repudiated. Lidia Avilova, however, was watching him intently at the party backstage:

  Anton kept his word and sent me a ticket to Ivanov … How he stood, strained and awkward, as if he was tied down. And in that glimmer of a smile I sensed a morbid tension, such tiredness and anguish that my arms drooped with helplessness. I had no doubt, despite the noisy success, that Anton was dissatisfied and unhappy.

  Anton fled to Moscow before the second performance on 3 February. The play had only five performances that season, although every house enthused. More sober evaluations came by post. Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, then a playwright, but not yet a director, spoke for posterity on Ivanov:

  You are the most talented … and I subscribe to this without the slightest feeling of envy, but I shan’t consider Ivanov to be among your best work … but to be among the original drafts of beautiful pieces.7

  Ivanov brought Anton two new friends. Nemirovich-Danchenko was in ten years to be the interpreter of Chekhov’s drama and then a close friend of Anton’s wife. The other was Pavel Svobodin, who played Ivanov’s uncle Shabelsky. Svobodin was bewitched by Anton for the rest of his short life. Svobodin and Anton were two over-worked consumptives, with contradictory streaks of idealism and cynicism. Svobodin believed in Chekhov’s genius and, with Suvorin, pushed Anton into finishing his next play, The Wood Demon.

  In Moscow Anton tried to help his less fortunate friends Gruzinsky, Ezhov and Barantsevich: he offered to revise their work, he persuaded Suvorin to take them on, but the acolytes felt insecure when they visited the Chekhovs in the winter of 1888–9. Gruzinsky, normally a good-natured man, resented the claims that Kolia, Vania, Masha and Pavel had on Anton. He and Ezhov loathed losing at whist to Vania (a game that Anton refused to learn). They disliked Masha and found Pavel sinister. Gruzinsky’s letters to Ezhov snarl:

  Ivan Chekhov is a weird character and, as Bilibin says of his older brother Aleksandr, ‘a crooked personality’ … I don’t like Chekhov’s father. Yes, certainly he was a tyrant and a wild beast. That sort almost always develop into ‘unctuous’ types … Maria Chekhova in passing argued that there is nothing more selfish than talent and genius. That was an allusion to her brother who is bursting his guts for them.8

  Ezhov saw Anton’s parents in a poor light. He recalled Easter 1889:

  Once Chekhov told his friends at tea: ‘Do you know, gentlemen, our cook is getting married. I’d like to take you to the wedding, but I’m afraid the cook’s guests will start beating us up.’ – ‘Antosha,’ remarked his mother, ‘You should read them your poetry and they won’t.’ Chekhov … suddenly frowned and said, ‘Mother still thinks I write poetry.’9

  It was true that Anton’s parents may never have read, or listened to, a word of his stories or plays. Ezhov was as envious as he was protective, and he soured his crony Gruzinsky, who complained to Ezhov:

  Anton Chekhov is strange: he says it’s terribly easy to go to Petersburg. His talent gives him perverted ideas about money … He asked me how much Leikin was paying me. [Anton said:] ‘Too little, awfully little … I get 70–80, once I got 90 roubles.’ And I’m grateful for 40!

  Anton found celebrities better company. Pleshcheev came to Moscow to celebrate his birthday and Shrovetide: he gorged on pancakes. Anton summoned his colleague Dr Obolonsky to treat the elderly poet. Suvorin promised to come and watch his Tatiana Repina, which, unlike Ivanov, was still running. He sent a balalaika (with no strings), and some photo-portraits of Chekhov; then came a telegram from Anna Suvorina: ‘HUSBAND NOW LEFT FOR MOSCOW DON’T FOR GET MEET HIM CHEER HIM AND AMUSE PROPERLY BUT SAME TIME REMEMBER ME.’10 Suvorin did not stay long. Renewed links encouraged the Dauphin to resume writing to Anton: he kept off Jews but, in the spirit of New Times, praised the Cossack Ashinov for invading the Horn of Africa. Anton, with embarrassment, confessed that he knew two of the invaders.11 The Dauphin also reported that their Tatar neighbour in Feodosia had seen Ivanov: the play had induced a fit of hysterics in a lady in the audience.

  Ivanov brought in nearly a thousand roubles: ‘A play is a pension,’ declared Anton. The Chekhovs made merry. Leikin pricked the bubble and told Chekhov that he had lost money by putting the play on late in the season (State Theatres closed on the first day of Lent), that his play gave actors no breaks for applause. Leikin added every drop of gall he could: he reported Palmin’s wild slanders. Anton responded:

  I haven’t seen Palmin once this month. How does he know I am losing blood, ill and afraid of madness? I haven’t had any hæmorrhage, thank God, since I left Petersburg (only just a little) … I have no reasons to fear sudden insanity for I don’t drink vodka for days on end, I don’t go in for spiritualism or masturbation, I don’t read the poet Palmin.

  Palmin, when challenged, told Leikin that his information came from Kolia. Leikin’s dogs, not his opinions, interested Anton. Leikin had acquired a pair of dachshunds and was so much in love with them that he finally had to promise puppies to Anton.

  Friendly with so many of the Lintvariov circle, the Chekhovs were bound to return to Luka that summer. Anton began composing The Wood Demon in his head, to write in its natural setting, the Lintvariov estate and the mills on the Psiol. He spent money: he bought a set of Dostoevsky and read it, apparently for the first time: ‘good, but very long and immodest. A lot of pretensions.’ For fun Anton then composed his most extraordinary play: a sequel to Suvorin’s Tatiana Repina. Chekhov shows Suvorin’s hero, who drove Repina to suicide, marrying in church: the marriage service is ruined by a mysterious lady in black who takes poison, and ‘the rest I leave to the imagination of A. S. Suvorin’. The genius of Chekhov’s parody sequel lies in the mingling of casual gossip by minor characters with the text of the liturgy which Chekhov knew so well. Anton sent the play to Suvorin: Suvorin went to his print room and had two copies printed, one for himself and one for Anton.

  This playful gift for absurdly mixing trivial and serious speech was to lead to two elements that mark out Chekhov’s mature drama: inconsequential conversation acting as a counterpoint to tragic utterances, and a plot which hangs on a character who has died before the action starts and about whom we shall never be told the truth. The corpse of Tatiana Repina haunts Chekhov’s gift to Suvorin, just as the professor’s first wife haunts Uncle Vania, Colonel Prozorov the Three Sisters, or Ranevskaia’s drowned son The Cherry Orchard.

  Notes

  1 Pleshcheev notes 14 v 1891, see Pis’ma russkikh pisatelei k Suvorina, Leningrad 1927, 130.

  2 Bowdlerized in the PSSP: see RGALI, 594 1 269.

  3 She was still writing Anton from Kharkov, inviting him there to help her husband.

  4 See S. I. Smirnova-Sazonova’s diary, LN87, 305.

  5 Shcheglov reconstructed the play, a poor piece, in 1911 as The Power of Hypnotism.

  6 See OR, 331 59 75: Anastasia Suvorina’s letters to Anton, 1889–1900.

  7 See Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko’s letter to Anton in Ezhegodnik MKhaTa, 1944, 1, 93.

  8 See RGALI, 189 1 19: Lazarev-Gruzinsky to Ezhov 1884–91: letters of 10 Dec. 1888, 21 Jan. 1889.

  9 See N. M. Ezhov, A. P. Chekhov in Istoricheskii vestnik, 1909, 11, 595–607.

  10 See OR, 331 59 46: Anna Suvorina’s letters to Anton, 1887–1901.

  11 At Obock Ashinov was joined
by Father Paisi, who had once dug Mitrofan Chekhov’s cellar, and Dr Tsvetaev, whom Chekhov had met at Voskresensk. When the French fired on the Cossacks, some of the invaders crossed the Danikil desert to serve the Negus of Abyssinia.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  A Death at Luka

  March–June 1889

  CHEKHOV TOOK UP his novel. He also made a mysterious trip to Kharkov, ostensibly to look at a ranch for Suvorin, but perhaps in response to Lily Markova’s (now Sakharova) invitation. The trip was, to judge by the hellish aura around Kharkov in his fiction, disagreeable. When Anton returned to Moscow on 15 March 1889, the horse-trams had stopped and blizzards had piled snowdrifts five feet high in front of the house. His mother showed him a postcard from Kolia:

  11 March 1889 … Dear Mama, Illness has prevented me from visiting you. Two weeks ago I caught a bad chill: I was shaking with fever and my side was hurting desperately. But now, thanks to quinine and various ointments I am better and hasten to work to make up for lost time …1

  TB had struck Kolia’s intestines. Anton diagnosed typhoid as well. On 29 March Anton, unsure of himself, summoned Nikolai Obolonsky again to Kolia’s bedside, back at Anna Ipatieva-Golden’s house: Anna told them that Kolia had not touched alcohol for two months. For ten days, longing to escape, Anton visited the feverish emaciated Kolia. It took four hours to cross Moscow’s thawing snow to see him.

  Anton brought Kolia home. Kolia described his rescue to a Taganrog friend:

  My brother sent me broth. Then on Easter Saturday a carriage was sent for me, they dressed me, and sent me to my mother and family. Almost nobody recognized me. They immediately put me to bed. At 2 a.m. on Easter Sunday everybody celebrates, shouting, noise, drinking wine, and I am lying out of the way, an outcast. The week after Easter there was a concilium with Karneevsky [Korneev?] and it was decided that I should eat as much as possible, drink vodka, beer, wine, and eat ham, herring, caviar.2

  Anton could only muse about his unwritten novel, a work ‘with all thoughts and hopes of good people, their norms and deviations, the framework being freedom’. Little freedom was in prospect. There was no money to take Kolia to a warm climate where he might rally, and he could not get a passport. Anton sought consolation in the stoic maxims of Marcus Aurelius, a book he marked heavily with his pencil.

  Meanwhile the servants made merry. Pavel and Evgenia were giving their cook, Olga, away in marriage. In late February, at the betrothal, the kitchen had rung with the sound of the harmonica and stamping boots. On 14 April, while Kolia lay moribund upstairs, the wedding feast began. Anton did not feel festive. He invited Schechtel to take leave of Kolia, who was now able to stand, and sent Misha and their mother to prepare the arrival of patient and doctor in the Ukraine. After he had seen them off, Anton went to a meeting of the Dramatic Society and afterwards, he confided in a letter to Dr Obolonsky,

  looked at the dawn then went for a walk, then I was in a foul pub where I watched two crooks play an excellent game of billiards, then I went to the sordid places where I chatted with a mathematics student and musicians, then I returned home, drank some vodka, had breakfast and then (at 6 a.m.) went to bed, was woken up early and am now suffering.

  Posting that letter, Chekhov took Kolia to the station and, in a first-class sleeping car, made the journey to Sumy. For the first time in months Kolia slept and ate well. Masha followed a few days later with shoes, a string for the mandolin, and paper and frames for Kolia. Despite, or because of, Kolia’s illness, many friends were invited down: Davydov, Barantsevich, the cellist Semashko, not to mention Vania. Suvorin proposed to call on his way to Austria and France. Anton told him: ‘How I’d love to go now somewhere like Biarritz where music is playing and there are lots of women. Were it not for the artist, I’d chase after you.’

  Aleksandr was not invited. Anton sternly told him that money was the only practical help. Aleksandr offered to marry Natalia – she would not risk pregnancy until she was married. Aleksandr became the first Russian male recorded buying a contraceptive. On a chit for Anton’s eyes alone he wrote, on 5 May:

  Engulfed by carnal lusts (after long abstinence) I bought in a chemists’ a condon (or condom – the devil knows) for 35 kopecks. But as soon as I tried to put it on, it burst, probably from fear at the sight of my shaft. So I had no luck. I had to tame the flesh again.3

  Kolia was too weak to flee. By day he sat, or lay in a hammock, sunbathing in the orchard. He ate for four, but could not digest food and could hardly walk. He coughed incessantly and he quarrelled with his mother. Other people’s deference to the dying made him more capricious. He was given creosote, ipecacuanha and menthol. Death cast a pall over the Psiol: the fishing and the songbirds lost their appeal. Anton tried to distract himself. He dreamed of Mlle Emilie, the Suvorins’ governess; he went to the Sumy theatre that Aleksandr had disrupted the previous year; he buried himself in work. He wrote the first act of The Wood Demon to an outline agreed with Suvorin: the core of this play, which eventually became Uncle Vania, is in the doctor-landowner who finds ecstasy in planting a birch tree, but there was little drama yet. The original plan was based on the Suvorins. The elderly professor, his young second wife, his daredevil son, two children called Boris and Nastia and a French governess called Mlle Emilie are the Suvorin family transferred to Luka; the idealists and cranks who cross their path have aspects of the Lintvariovs and the Chekhovs. From the start, the material is unstageable, for it is as rich and broad as Middlemarch. Suvorin would soon back out, but Chekhov persisted.

  On 8 May Suvorin arrived for six days, on his way to more comfortable summer quarters. His arrival caused as much tension as that of the professor in Uncle Vania. The Lintvariovs, principled radicals, ostracized Suvorin (not that this stopped them from later asking Suvorin to send their village school free books). Anton was torn between two sets of friends. Worse, Kolia begged Suvorin for an advance for book cover designs. (Anton forbad Suvorin to pay him.) Meanwhile Kolia’s mistress, Anna Ipatieva-Golden, at her wit’s end near Moscow, was begging both Suvorin and Anton for financial help and a job.

  Suvorin promised Anton 30 kopecks a line for the novel. He tactfully talked of buying a dacha nearby, but soon left for his villa in the Crimea. From there he discussed with Anton Paul Bourget’s novel, The Disciple. Suvorin sympathized with Bourget’s attacks on free-thinkers as the godfathers of anarchy and murder. Russian readers, said Anton, liked Bourget only because French culture was better: ‘a Russian writer lives in drainpipes, eating slugs, making love to sluts and laundresses, he knows no history, geography, natural sciences.’ Anton wrote grimly to Leikin: he yearned for a time ‘when I shall have my own corner, my own wife, not somebody else’s … free of vanity and quarrels.’

  Kolia also longed to be elsewhere. He wrote letters, mostly unposted, in all directions, begging for help. Kolia wanted to be back in his birthplace:

  I definitely need to visit Taganrog on business and, while I’m there, bathe in the sea … Get me a ticket from Kharkov to Taganrog and back … The class of ticket should correspond to my social position and take account of my weak state. In exchange I’ll send you a woman’s head painted in oils (very nicely done, I don’t want to part with it) … I impatiently wait for a letter with ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ but with no ‘ifs’ etc.4

  Kolia still had a sharp eye and steady hand. He wrote a calligraphic masterpiece to Dr Obolonsky, and illustrated it with a stout passenger in a first-class compartment and a train steaming across the steppes.

  Misha’s letters to his cousin Georgi draw a veil over Kolia. He had to give up revisiting Taganrog: ‘The poor man is so bad that really it would be awkward to leave him.’ As Kolia declined, Misha ignored him. On 29 May 1889 he told Georgi:

  If you knew how good our evenings are, you’d drop everything, dacha, family, and come straight away to us … The smell of flowering lime trees, elder and jasmine and the scent of newly mown hay, scattered over our terrace for Trinity Day and the moon, like a pancake hanging ov
er us … Next to me Masha is sitting, just back from Poltava, and a little further is nice Ivanenko. Both are reading. Through the open window come the conversations of Suvorin, who’s come to stay with us, and … Anton … Semashko has taken a room with us for the whole summer, so all summer we shall be enjoying music.

  At the end of May the irrepressible actor Pavel Svobodin came, but could not bear the spectre – he too was dying of tuberculosis. He took a train back for Moscow, but Vania persuaded Svobodin to turn back and give the Chekhovs moral support in a seemingly interminable vigil. Kolia, Anton reported to Dr Obolonsky on 4 June, was bedridden, losing weight every day. He was taking atropine and quinine, dozing, sometimes deliriously. A priest gave last rites: Kolia confessed to maltreating his mother. Then he wrote with frenzy: graphic childhood memories, letters to Uncle Mitrofan and Suvorin, begging for loans, promising paintings.

  Aleksandr insisted on coming: he gave Suvorin a reason so odd that Suvorin passed it to Anton: ‘ambulatory typhoid’ became the Chekhov term for alcoholism:

  I am fettered to my bed. I had ambulatory typhoid. I was able to walk, attend events and fires and give the paper reports. Now the doctor says I have a relapse. The doctor is urging me south; give me leave and the right to take 2 months’ salary (140 roubles) in advance.5