At 2 p.m. on 15 June Aleksandr arrived with the children and Natalia, and for one hour all five Chekhov brothers were together. After two harrowing months on duty, sleeping in the room next to Kolia, Anton suddenly snapped. Taking Vania, Svobodin, and George Lintvariov with him, at 3 p.m. he took the carriage to see the Smagins, a hundred miles away in Poltava. Evgenia, exhausted, could not cope; Misha refused to recognize Kolia’s agony and went to an annexe to sleep. Aleksandr alone nursed Kolia for two nights. Anton had left no morphine, and few medicines. The three local doctors – including two Lintvariov daughters – stayed away.
In a long letter to Pavel (who was not summoned to Sumy that summer), Aleksandr showed himself at his best.
As I drove up to the manor house I met Anton in the courtyard, then Masha, Vania and Misha came onto the porch. Mama met us in the hall and began kissing her grandchildren. ‘Have you seen Kolia?’ Vania asked me … I went into the room and saw that instead of the old Kolia a skeleton was lying there. He was horribly emaciated. His cheeks had sunk, his eyes fallen in and shining … To the last he didn’t know he had TB. Anton hid it from him and he thought he just had typhoid.
‘Brother, stay with me, I’m an orphan without you. I’m alone all the time. Mother, brothers and sister come to see me, but I’m alone.’ … When I lifted him from the bed onto the pot I was always afraid that I might break his legs … The next morning I went crayfishing in the river, not for the crayfish but to get strength for the next night.6
Kolia talked of living in Petersburg with Aleksandr and said that he loved his father.
At supper I said ‘God grant Kolia lives till morning’ … Our sister said I was talking rubbish, that Kolia was alive, would go on living, that he often had these attacks. I calmed down … Everyone went to bed … Kolia was completely rational. He kept going to sleep and waking. At 2 in the morning he wanted to go outside; I tried to lift him onto a wheelchair but he decided to wait and asked me to fluff up his pillows. While I was doing that he burst like a fountain. ‘Look, brother, I’ve shat myself like a baby in bed.’ At 3 a.m. he became very bad; he began choking on mucus … Around 6 a.m. Kolia started choking. I ran to the annexe to ask Misha what dose to give Kolia. Misha turned over in bed and replied, ‘Aleksandr, you keep exaggerating.’ … I raced back to Kolia. He seemed to be dozing. At 7 a.m. he spoke. ‘Aleksandr lift me. Are you asleep?’ I lifted him. ‘No, I’m better lying.’ I laid him down. ‘Lift me up a bit.’ He offered me both arms. I raised him, he sat up, tried to cough but couldn’t. He wanted to vomit. I supported him with one arm and tried to get the pot from the floor with the other. ‘Water, water.’ But it was too late. I called, shouted ‘Mama, Masha, Nata [Natalia Lintvariova].’ Nobody came to help. They ran in when it was all over. Kolia died in my arms. Mama came very late and I had to wake Misha to tell him that Kolia had died.
Notes
1 See OR, 331 82 16: Kolia’s postcard to Evgenia.
2 See OR, 331 82 25: Kolia’s letter to an unidentified Aleksandr Viktorovich (May? 1889).
3 See OR, 331 32 15: this passage is cut from Pis’ma, 1939.
4 See OR, 331 82 25: Kolia’s letter to an unidentified Aleksandr Viktorovich (May? 1889).
5 See RGALI, 459 1 4617: Aleksandr Chekhov’s letters to A. S. Suvorin, 1888–96.
6 See OR, 331 31 1: Aleksandr’s letters to Pavel Chekhov, 1874–96.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Shaking the Dust
June–September 1889
THE DEATH OF KOLIA on 17 June 1889 shook Anton to the core: for years to come he hinted how much he was haunted by it. He knew: last year Anna, this year Kolia, in a year or two Fenichka, Svobodin, and then himself, not to mention a dozen other friends, would die of the ‘white plague’. He became restless and could not stay in one place more than a month.
As soon as Kolia died, the family summoned him back to Luka from the Smagins. He wrote to Pleshcheev:
For the rest of my life I shall never forget that filthy road, the grey sky, the tears on the trees; I say never forget because a ragged peasant came from Mirgorod that morning with a soaking wet telegram: ‘Kolia dead.’ You can imagine my feelings. I had to gallop back to the station, take the train and wait at stations for eight hours at a time … I remember sitting in a park; it was dark, terribly cold, hellishly dreary; behind the brown wall where I was sitting actors were rehearsing a melodrama.
The Lintvariovs took charge. Elena led Masha and Evgenia away, while peasant women laid out the body – ‘dry as tinder and yellow as wax’, Misha noted – on the floor. The church bells rang; the priest and cantor held a requiem. Elena offered money for the burial; Aleksandr found a carpenter to make a cross. Aleksandr’s two boys spent the night with their grandmother. Masha was taken in by the Lintvariovs. Three old women from the estate kept vigil over the corpse, while the cantor chanted psalms. At noon the next day a white coffin lined with brocade came from Sumy: Kolia was lifted in. Evgenia, in black, prostrated herself by the coffin. Letters and telegrams were sent off. Misha went to Sumy to find a photographer. That evening Anton returned. Misha flared up at Aleksandr and Natalia, and demanded that they move to separate quarters. After Kolia’s death the two brothers loathed each other. Aleksandr wrote a note asking Anton to intervene.
After another vigil with whispering old women and a chanting cantor, a truce reigned. The Lintariovs had Kolia buried in their graveyard, on the hill behind the dacha where he had died. Misha described the funeral to Pavel in Moscow:
Mother and Masha were sobbing so much that we couldn’t bear to look at them. When we took the coffin out Masha and the Lintvariov girls carried the lid, while six of us – Antosha, Vania, Sasha, I, Ivanenko and George Lintvariov carried the coffin. We said a prayer for the dead at each corner of the church. There was a solemn matins, the church was fully lit and everyone held a candle. While matins was said a cross was taken to the cemetery and all the furniture was removed from the house and the floors were scrubbed … A mass of people followed the coffin, with icons, as in Taganrog: like a procession with the cross. At the cemetery, when we took our leave, everyone was sobbing, mother was in anguish and couldn’t be parted from the body … all the ordinary people in the funeral were issued a pie, a headscarf and a glass of vodka, while the clergy and the Lintariovs had lunch and tea. After dinner mama and I went back to the cemetery, mama grieved, wept, and we went back.1
Aleksandr’s account to his father adds one detail: ‘Everyone is howling. The only one not crying is Anton and that is awful.’2 Anton refused to weep, perhaps for fear his grief might turn to self-pity. The new cross, with Kolia’s name painted by Misha, could be seen for miles around from the north, the west and the south.
Obituaries were printed; Kolia’s friends forgot their grudges. Diukovsky, the school inspector, who had loved the Chekhovs from their first Moscow years, declared that Kolia was ‘my only friend, the most disinterested and sincere of men’. Franz Schechtel wept for a ‘lost brother’:
It’s good that he spent his last, perhaps his happiest, days in his family; and, had he not broken with his family for that nomadic life, which drew him so much, he would most probably have been healthy and happy.3
Gruzinsky wrote to Ezhov:
I’m sad, Hedgehog, sad, as if he were one of my close relatives … Peace to the disorderly but talented and dearest of artists … Poor Anton!4
There were requiems and tears in Taganrog. In Moscow Pavel showed fortitude:
Dear Antosha, At your aunt Fenichka’s request I send 10 roubles belonging to Aleksandr. I read your letter to your aunt, it is very joyful for my parental heart that Kolia took Last Communion and that the burial followed Christian rites. I sincerely thank you for the love which you showed your brother Kolia with respect to the burial and memorial. For this God will show you much mercy and health. Fenichka is grieving, groaning and coughing, she hadn’t known about Kolia’s death, I hadn’t told her. Kolia’s obituary is in News of the Day … I should like to visit
Kolia’s grave, to look and say a prayer. May he rest in peace.5
Three days later Anton took the family thirty miles to spend a few days at the monastery of Akhtyrka, where they had, only weeks before, clowned and laughed with Natalia Lintvariova and Pavel Svobodin, and Anton had announced himself to the monks as Count Wild-Boar.
When Anton returned to Luka, there were tempting invitations. He was expected by Grigorovich and the Suvorins in Vienna, for a tour of Europe. The actor-manager Lensky and his wife Lika Lenskaia had taken the Moscow Maly theatre on tour to Odessa and invited Anton to recuperate there. Telling Suvorin he was ‘yours to the end of my days’, on 2 July Anton (with Vania) set off not to Europe but in the opposite direction. Two days later they were dining with Lensky’s actors. A journalist greeted Anton: it was Piotr Sergeenko, a Taganrog schoolmate, who took Anton to see Odessa’s rising star, Ignati Potapenko. Potapenko sang, played the violin, told funny stories and wrote plays. Four years later Potapenko was to become an alter ego, both genial and sinister, in Anton’s life, but now he was ‘the god of boredom’.
The actresses were kindly goddesses. Anton drifted to room 48 in The Northern Hotel: there Kleopatra Karatygina and Glafira Panova dispensed tea, chatter, flattery, flirtation and consolation. The only ‘older woman’ in Chekhov’s life, Kleopatra, at forty-one, was neither sociable nor pretty. Known as ‘Beetle’, she was the thinnest and most ill-used actress in the Maly. She knew she would never play Ophelia: she played Death in Don Juan. Homeless, widowed young, she understood Anton’s unhappiness. Her description of Chekhov that summer has gentle irony as well as motherly concern. She first saw him on the sea-shore:
A young man, handsome, elegant, a pleasant face, with a small bushy beard; wearing a grey suit, a soft pork-pie hat, a beautiful tie and a shirt with a frilly neckline and cuffs. Overall, an impression of elegance but … O horror!! he was holding a big one-pound paper bag and nibbling sunflower seeds (a southerner’s habit).6
‘Antony and Cleopatra’ were the talk of the town, but Glafira Panova, a pretty debutante of nineteen, also fascinated Anton. To Vania, who had gone back to Luka, he described his ten days in Odessa:
At 12 I take Panova to Zembrini’s for ice cream (60 kopecks) and trail after her to the milliner’s, the shops for lace etc. The heat, of course, is unbelievable. At 2 I have been going to Sergeenko’s and then to Olga’s for borshch and sauce. At 5 tea with Karatygina, which is always very noisy and fun; at 8, after tea, we go to the theatre. Offstage. Treating coughing actresses and planning the next day. Lika Lenskaia alarmed, afraid of spending money; Panova, her black eyes searching for whomever she needs … After the show, a glass of vodka in the buffet downstairs and then wine in a cellar, waiting for the actresses to gather for tea in Karatygina’s room. More tea, we take our time, until 2 in the morning and gossip about the most devilish things … I’m completely feminized. I’ve practically been wearing skirts and not a day has passed without virtuous Lika Lenskaia telling me with a meaningful look that Medvedev [the director] is afraid of letting Panova go on tour and that Mme Pravdina (also virtuous but a very nasty person) is gossiping to everyone and about her, Lika, for supposedly conniving at sin.
To Anton’s horror, the Lenskys, supposing Anton had seduced and compromised Glafira Panova, tried to engineer a marriage between him and the girl, but, Anton insisted years later to Olga Knipper, he ‘had not seduced a single soul’. He asked Kleopatra Karatygina in Petersburg in January 1890: ‘Why is that Lenskaia poking her nose in where it’s not wanted? Actors and artists should never get married. Any artist, writer, actor loves only their art, is entirely, only absorbed by it.’
Kleopatra’s relations with Chekhov began lightly. Chekhov brought laughter into her life. When she complained about playing skeletons and death, Chekhov gave her a prescription; she was taking it to the chemist’s when she saw that it was for ‘poison for Pravdin and Grekov’, the Maly’s lead actors. She fell in love; Anton’s friendship was not disinterested. Karatygina had spent half of her life in Siberia, partly as a governess in Kiakhta on the Mongolian border, and she sowed in Anton the seed of an idea. He questioned her about Siberia.
Anton ignored Suvorin’s telegrams, although Grigorovich met the train from Russia at Vienna Hauptbahnhof day after day. Grigorovich wrote to Suvorin: ‘Chekhov has absolutely no languages and is unused to foreign travel … he hasn’t been treating us like a European … He’s a Slav, disorderly with no firm support to help him control himself … I’m now angry with him.’7
Anton was in fact on a boat to the Crimea. At Luka, meanwhile, he had missed an event. Less than four weeks after Kolia’s death, Aleksandr wrote to Pavel:
Dear Papa, I have kept the promise I made you. Today at 12 I married Natalia Golden. Mama and Misha gave their blessing. Father Mitrofan conducted the wedding. After the wedding we went to Kolia’s grave.
Aleksandr’s timing is matched by an implausibility in the play which Chekhov was writing: Act 3 of The Wood Demon ends with the suicide of Uncle Georges; in Act 4, two weeks later, the cast celebrates marriage. The Chekhovs, teeth gritted, accepted Aleksandr’s marriage. Natalia, too, had demanded marriage: since she had arrived as ‘children’s maid’ at Luka, she had found her humiliating status excruciating, even more so perhaps than hearing Anton use her pet-name Natashevu for another Natalia, Natalia Lintvariova. Aleksandr, Natalia and the children left for Petersburg. In Moscow Fenichka had to beg Pavel: ‘Natalia asks for 2 roubles, she hasn’t got the fare, as soon as they get home she’ll send it, she has 50 roubles hidden from Aleksandr.’8 Not for fifteen years did Aleksandr and Natalia visit their relatives en famille. Natalia Golden, no longer a concubine but the wife of a Chekhov, was still a pariah.
On 16 July 1889, reeling from the heavy seas, Anton landed at Yalta. There another three sisters entered his life. With a troupe of actors in Yalta was the widowed Mrs Shavrova and her three daughters, Elena, Olga and Anna. Elena was a precocious fifteen. She accosted Anton in a café; she had written a story ‘Sophie’, about a Georgian prince’s love for her mother. Anton rewrote it for her, making the prince in love with the daughter. Chekhov had opened a school of creative writing – a task he liked, even if the pupil was not a pretty girl. A flirtation started with Elena: a Biblical seven years would pass before she offered Anton her body.
Anton stayed three weeks in the Crimea. When he was not charming the Shavrova girls, he mused aloud to aspiring writers: one, the twenty-four-year-old Ilia Gurliand, noted Chekhov’s rules for drama:
Things on stage should be as complicated and yet as simple as in life. People dine, just dine, while their happiness is made and their lives are smashed. If in Act 1 you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act. There’s nothing harder than to write a good farce.
Friends at home and abroad were, like Grigorovich, aggrieved; the actor Pavel Svobodin wrote, ‘Villain, to drop Rome for Deribasova street in Odessa.’9 Leikin asked: ‘I was flabbergasted, how could you head abroad, not reach the frontier and turn away. What weak will! How could you fail to take a ticket to Vienna … I have spent two weeks in Yalta. It is a bandit town.’10
By August Anton was sated with women. He told Pleshcheev that they now all seemed ugly, Masha that they all smelt of ice cream. Pavel was writing to Anton c/o the Suvorins in Paris, but Anton did not go abroad. He did not know where Suvorin was, he had no money and he had to write. He had promised Svobodin The Wood Demon and The Northern Herald a long story. Besides, his unruly father had to be quelled – Pavel was harassing Anna Golden for Kolia’s paintings. By 11 August 1889 Anton was back at Sumy, with Misha, Masha and Evgenia. Vania was back in Moscow, where, Pavel reported, Aunt Fenichka had taken a turn for the worse. Kolia’s death had broken her heart, and Gavrilov demanded, on pain of dismissal, that her son Aliosha stay in the warehouse. Nobody nursed her.
For a fortnight Anton worked at ‘My Name and I’, his bleakest and most powerful piece so far, later titled ‘A Dreary Stor
y’. Told by a professor of medicine, incurably ill, it surveys life with the despondent wisdom of Solomon. The professor is alienated from the wife he loved, the students who adore him, even the actress to whom an ambiguous affection binds him. He loathes his daughter’s music and her fiancé. His disillusion with all things Russian is so wittily expressed, his fear of death so moving that the reader forgives him the torture he inflicts on others. Readers saw parallels with real medical luminaries, or read the story as a retort to Tolstoy’s recent Death of Ivan Ilyich. The despair implicit in Chekhov’s story, however, was the aftermath of Kolia’s death. Not yet thirty, Anton felt like his moribund professor.
The play that Anton, at Pavel Svobodin’s insistence, struggled to write, also centres on an elderly professor. This professor is, however, a nuisance and a pedant, and The Wood Demon is hopeful, not despairing, even though a central character, Uncle Georges, kills himself. Only the ‘Wood Demon’, a highly strung doctor, saving forests from the professor’s predation, has any autobiographical input. The Wood Demon however is strikingly clumsy and tedious. Anton, inspired by his own thoughts of death, was unable to make a drama out of another person’s idyll. His finest prose and most awkward drama arose at the same desk. Death infiltrated other work: revising for Suvorin the story of an unhappy adolescent, ‘His First Love’, for a new book, Chekhov retitled it Volodia. Like Suvorin’s Volodia two years before, the fictional Volodia, too, shoots himself dead.11
On 3 September 1889 Valentina Ivanova, a schoolteacher who admired Anton and for whom Vania pined, packed the Chekhov bags. At four on a freezing morning, the surviving Chekhovs and Marian Semashko said goodbye to the Lintvariovs. The death of Kolia had brought them close: Aleksandra Lintvariova refused rent for that summer. Anton felt an enduring affection for them: ‘If it were acceptable to pray to sacred women and maidens before the heavenly angels take their souls to heaven, I’d long ago have written a psalm to you and your sisters,’ he told Elena. The Chekhovs took a slow train for Moscow. In their carriage sat Professor Storozhenko, Masha’s examiner. Chekhov made Masha’s embarrassment worse: ‘I talked loudly about working as a cook for Countess Keller and what nice masters I had; before I took a drink I bowed to mother and said I hoped she’d find a good position in Moscow. Semashko pretended to be a valet.’ In November 1889 Chekhov would tell Suvorin, and his play would prove it, ‘I have it in for professors.’12
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