Anton Chekhov

by Donald Rayfield

  The Chekhovs received a telegram dated 12 October 1890 from a ship of the Voluntary Fleet, Petersburg: ‘Unloaded convicts, left Korsakovsk 10th, will pick up Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, leaving [for] Odessa 13th.’3 In Vladivostok Anton got a foreign passport from the chief of police, and telegraphed to Aleksandr in Petersburg, the only sibling whose address he had: ‘Sailing Singapore Chekhov’.

  The family had endured its own Sakhalin. They knew little of Anton’s adventures. In his absence they sought protection from Suvorin. On his way to his Crimean villa, Suvorin called on Masha. He offered both her and Vania work; he invited Misha to Feodosia. Misha was, thanks to Suvorin, a tax inspector, but he was unhappy in his provincial hotel room. All Anton’s siblings were under Suvorin’s wing. Only Evgenia felt abandoned. All July at Luka she nagged Pavel:

  for God’s sake, ask Vania to find us a flat, we are leaving here on the 2nd [of September] and I’m worn out with worry … we need money badly … Masha sent a letter to Aleksandr the day after we had his letter and he still isn’t sending us any money.4

  In September Evgenia and Pavel found new quarters. Olga Kundasova came to live there for a few weeks; Suvorin called twice. Pavel, quelled for once, described to Vania the shouting matches between the reactionary tycoon and the radical feminist, whom Suvorin called ‘Psychopath!’ The Chekhovs moved again, but this house was expensive and small. Evgenia wrote to Vania on 8 October:

  On 4 October we moved to new quarters, Malaia Dmitrovka. Firgang’s house, a detached house, 2 floors, 800 roubles. Antosha and Masha upstairs, two rooms, downstairs papa and I and the dining room, you’re welcome to come, you’ll be fed, it’s hard for you and I miss you and I’m very sorry, Misha went to Efremov on 1 October, he’ll stay there 2 weeks and then be transferred to Aleksin, somewhere the other side of Serpukhov, no news from Anton, we don’t know where he is, we meant to telegraph Suvorin to ask, we don’t know where Suvorin is either, we are all exhausted … I’m sorry for Masha, she has been most unhappy of all. If I miss anyone it’s you. I keep mourning, my lovely hawks have all flown the nest. Lika Mizinova has been in the country for two weeks … Fenichka is barely alive, she can’t hold anything.5

  The new Moscow flat with its two servants, the elderly retainer and cook Mariushka and a new chambermaid, never felt like home. The carters had broken Evgenia’s sewing machine and Masha’s wardrobe. From Petersburg (where he was entertaining Pavel) Aleksandr urged Masha:

  Dearest Sister, Why are you moving like matchmakers almost every day from one flat to another? … Nobody knows where Anton is now. Probably he’s not even writing to Suvorin … What ties you and mother to Moscow? Essentially, apart from many years’ habit, nothing. Come and live with me in Petersburg. I have been saying this to Vater in Petersburg, but he has some weighty considerations on this account.6

  Natalia added: ‘Dear Masha, I am sincerely sorry for you, now you are completely alone, but God grant Anton will soon arrive and you will have your happy days.’ The telegram from Vladivostok with news of Anton’s return relieved Masha. She told Misha:

  We are very pleased with the flat, we have settled very well indeed, come and look. The day before yesterday Suvorin came. He came specially to offer me a post in his bookshop, at first just as a shop assistant … I was very pleased of course, but remembered that Anton might not be especially pleased … I asked Suvorin to wait for Anton to arrive.7

  The literary world could relax in Chekhov’s absence. Only a few travel sketches from Siberia had appeared in print under his name. The dramatist and editor V. A. Tikhonov recorded in his diary:

  What a powerful, sheer elemental force Anton Chekhov is! But how many enviers he has attracted from among our authors … The most repellent in this respect is Shcheglov; he slobbered over Chekhov as a most devoted friend; now he has started hissing at him behind his back.8

  Chekhov enjoyed the Petersburg, a sturdy 300-foot steamer built in Scotland twenty years before. It was lightly loaded – no prisoners ever came back from Sakhalin. Leaving Vladivostok on 19 October 1890, the ship held a mere 364 sailors, soldiers and guards, relieved from service in the Far East. The American whalers were to be dropped at Hong Kong. A few passengers occupied the cabins. One was Father Irakli, a Buriat Mongol who had been given a free passage to Russia to report in Moscow on his missionary work with the Gilyaks and Ainu. The Captain appeared only during a storm in the China Sea and told passengers who had revolvers to keep them loaded, since death by shooting was preferable to death by drowning. A midshipman Glinka struck up an acquaintance with Anton: he was the son of a Baroness Ikskul who in Petersburg had given (and broken) a promise to use her power to smooth Anton’s passage.

  Sakhalin was the evil face of colonialism; Hong Kong impressed Chekhov as the opposite. The ship stayed there eighty hours. Anton told Suvorin, on his return:

  A wonderful bay, such movement on the sea as I have never seen even in pictures; nine roads, horse-trams, a railway up the mountain, museums, botanical gardens; wherever you look you see the Englishmen’s most tender concern for their employees, there is even a sailors’ club. I … was annoyed to hear my Russian companions cursing the English for exploiting the natives. I thought: yes, the English exploit the Chinese, the Sepoys, the Indians, but they do give them roads, piped water, museums, Christianity, you [Russians] exploit them and what do you give them?

  As they crossed the China Sea, the storms died away. On 20 October, just one day into the voyage home, one soldier died of ‘acute pneumonia’ in the ship’s hospital: his body was thrown overboard in a sailcloth shroud. As they left Hong Kong, on 29 October, another soldier died and was buried at sea. Anton’s mood plunged. He barely remembered Singapore for the tears that he was holding back (although in his few hours on shore he ordered a Javanese pony as a present for Suvorin).

  Burial at sea inspired Chekhov to write the first fiction he had composed for a year, ‘Gusev’, an awesome portrayal of nature’s indifference to death. The grim philosophy of ‘A Dreary Story’ was now matched with the vision of nature in ‘Steppe’: Chekhov’s post-Sakhalin phase had begun. The story had the by-line Colombo. Fifty-eight hours spent in Ceylon, the legendary Eden, revived Anton’s spirits. He took a train to Kandy in the mountains, and watched the Salvation Army: ‘girls in Indian dresses and glasses, drum, harmonicas, guitars, a flag, a crowd of bare-arsed little boys … Virgins sing something wild, and the drum goes boom boom! And all that in the dark, on the shores of a lake.’ After the Salvation Army Kandy offered something more to his taste:

  I was sated to the throat with palm groves and bronze-skinned women. When I have children then I shall tell them not without pride, ‘You sons of bitches, in my day I had intercourse with a black-eyed Indian girl … and where? In a coconut plantation on a moonlit night.’

  This was the exploit of which he was to boast to his Petersburg friends – ‘the real charmers are coloured women,’ he told Ezhov.9

  There was another transaction in Colombo. Midshipman Glinka and Chekhov went to an Indian animal-dealer and each bought a tame male mongoose; Chekhov went back to the dealer and bought another animal, too wild to handle and sold as a female mongoose. With these animals they returned to the Petersburg. On 12 November 1890 the ship left Colombo. Thirteen days passed without a port. Midshipman Glinka and Anton Chekhov sat on deck with their mongooses. In late November Chekhov passed through the Suez Canal. Pavel wrote: ‘Greetings to Holy Palestine, in which the world’s Redeemer lived. You will be passing Jerusalem’. Uncle Mitrofan was so moved, Georgi reported, that ‘my father put Anton’s letter on the chest of drawers, covered it with his hat and went to church.’ Pavel was tracing Anton’s journey on a wall map of Siberia; he wrote to Vania just before Anton docked in Odessa: ‘I think only about Antosha, may he return safe and sound. Such separation is unbearable. Come and meet him. Misha will come too.’10 Anton saw Mt Sinai, and then sailed past the island of Santurini which supplied Taganrog with wine. On 2 December the ship reached Odes
sa. After three days’ quarantine the passengers disembarked. Anton, Glinka, Father Irakli and the mongooses took the express to Moscow. On 7 December Evgenia and Misha intercepted the train at Tula. Misha recalled:

  We found Anton dining in the station restaurant with Midshipman Glinka … and a strange looking man, an aborigine with a broad, flat face and narrow slanting eyes. This was the chief priest of Sakhalin, monk-priest Irakli … wearing an ordinary suit of an absurd Sakhalin cut. As they ate, the mongooses stood on their hind legs and kept peeking at their plates. The Sakhalin priest, his face as flat as a board and without a hint of facial hair, and the mongooses seemed so exotic that a whole crowd gathered around the diners, gawping at them. ‘Is he a Red Indian?’ ‘Are they apes?’ came the questions. After a touching reunion with the writer, mother and I got in the same carriage and the five of us set off for Moscow. Apart from the mongoose Anton had brought in a cage a very wild female mongoose which soon turned out to be a palm cat.11

  Misha and Anton drank and played with the mongooses for the four hour journey. Father Irakli and Midshipman Glinka’s mongoose stayed with the Chekhovs for some time. The Firgang house was crowded. Pavel now came home every evening. (He was soon to retire from Gavrilov’s warehouse.) While he put up with the mongooses, which dug up potted plants and scrabbled in his beard, the palm cat was unbearable. It would emerge at night and bite the twitching feet of any guest sleeping in the dining room. (For Pavel, Anton’s ‘mongooses’ were a bench mark of animal delinquency.) The male mongoose was christened Svoloch, best translated as ‘Sod’. Sod and Suvorin were uppermost in Anton’s mind. Sick with the change of climate (he had a cold, constipation, hæmorrhoids and, he claimed, impotence) he stayed at home and wrote letters. He told Leikin that mongooses were better than dachshunds, ‘a mixture of rat and crocodile, tiger and monkey’. To Shcheglov he wrote:

  If only you knew what lovely animals I brought from India! They are mongooses, the size of half-grown kittens, very cheerful lively beasts. Their qualities are: daring, curiosity and affection for man. They fight rattle snakes and always win, they are afraid of nothing and nobody and, as for curiosity, there isn’t a parcel or package in the room they don’t open; when they meet anyone they first of all poke around in pockets to see what’s there? When they’re left alone in the room they start to cry.

  He did not mention mongooses to Suvorin: instead he confessed his disillusionment with humanity – after Sakhalin his contempt for the Russian intelligentsia extended to Suvorin’s closest collaborators:

  I passionately want to talk to you. My soul is seething. I want nobody but you, for you are the only one I can talk to … When shall I see you and Anna? How is Anna? Greetings to Boria and Nastia; to prove I have been a convict I shall, when I come to see you, attack them with a knife and yell wildly. I shall set fire to Anna’s room … I embrace you and all your house warmly, except for … Burenin who … should long ago have been exiled to Sakhalin.

  For a month Anton was too ill to leave the house, let alone visit Petersburg. He spent Christmas and New Year with his family.

  Notes

  1 P. Kononovich is recorded as a pupil of Taganrog gimnazia in the 1850s: if General Kononovich is a relative, this might explain his affability to Anton.

  2 See OR, 331 33 126: Evgenia’s letters to Anton, 1875–1904.

  3 See LN87, 294–300: Plavanie A. P. Chekhova (from the log of the Petersburg).

  4 See OR, 331 33 125: Evgenia’s letters to Pavel Chekhov, 1875–90.

  5 See RGALI, 2540 1 160: Evgenia’s letters to Ivan, 1888–1905.

  6 See OR, 331 31 1: the letter to Masha 8 Oct. 1890 is filed with Aleksandr’s letters to his parents.

  7 See RGALI, 2540 1 483: Masha’s letters to Mikhail Chekhov, 1884–1904: 15 Oct. 1890. A year later Suvorin offered Vania a career in his Moscow bookshop, see RGALI, 2540 1 143.

  8 See LN68, 496.

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

  10 See RGALI, 2540 1 158: Pavel’s letters to Ivan, 1879–98: 29 Nov. 1890.

  11 See Vokrug Chekhova, 278–80; OR, 331 83 25: Misha’s Chekhov i mangusy.

  THIRTY-THREE

  The Flight to Europe

  January–May 1891

  ANTON SPENT DECEMBER 1890 sorting out boxes of cards and papers from Sakhalin and revising his story ‘Gusev’. Winter in Russia that year was harsh: Moscow plunged to minus 30°, in Taganrog snow reached the eaves. Irregular heart beats and a cough kept Chekhov awake; by day hæmorrhoids made sitting painful. The house was crowded – Vania had caught typhoid in the marshes of Sudogda and came to recuperate. Mentally, Anton had changed. His fiction was to show how Sakhalin had destroyed his respect for authority and strong men. His affection for Suvorin survived, but he now felt contempt for New Times. He rarely referred to Sakhalin in his fiction, but his confirmed distrust of ideology, and his preference for unspoilt nature over spoiled humanity are Sakhalin’s legacy. Chekhov’s remarks to Suvorin that December echo those he would give to his fictional heroes: ‘God’s world is good. One thing is not good: us.’

  Lika Mizinova, Olga Kundasova – who brought her seventeen-year-old sister Zoe along – and the piano teacher Aleksandra Pokhlebina all danced attendance on Anton. In the Crimea Masha had met Countess Klara Mamuna: she became Misha’s fiancée, but for a year she too focused on Anton. In Petersburg others were waiting. New rumours of impending marriage were spreading. While Anton was away, the old poet Pleshcheev had unexpectedly inherited two million roubles from a cousin who died intestate. His daughter Elena became an heiress. All Petersburg, from Anna Suvorina to Aleksandr Chekhov, urged Anton, half in jest, to propose.

  To Burenin the journey to Sakhalin had been radical posturing by a failed talent. The radicals, however, acclaimed a politicized Chekhov. ‘Gusev’ won praise all round: the story’s hero, a doomed tubercular soldier buried at sea, was seen by the left as a victim of a ruthless system and by the right as a model of Christian resignation. Tchaikovsky was moved. Natalia’s dentist refused to accept payment from her, as Chekhov’s sister-in-law. Two years late, the Dauphin sent a promised gift of Santurini wine, with a letter in fine Latin, ending: ‘Dii te servent, nymphae ament, doctores que ne curent. Tuus A.1 The Gods were not obliging, and Anton would not let any doctor treat him, but the nymphs were loving. The Dauphin’s wine helped Anton cope with his friends’ misery.

  Ezhov was still suicidal after his wife’s death; he survived because he now wrote for Suvorin, and, vouched for by Masha, was teaching drawing to girls in a school run by a Madame Mangus [Mongoose].2 Ivanenko, his sister-in-law dead, his brother dying of TB, had lost hope and abandoned his flute, while Zinaida Lintvariova, ill with a brain tumour, Ivanenko reported, ‘is sincerely and patiently waiting for her end. She keeps asking with great interest after you and your family, the poor woman cannot bear it.’3 The ‘white plague’ struck old friends in Taganrog. Death was gathering in Aunt Fenichka in Moscow and Anton’s friend the actor Svobodin in Petersburg. After watching a soldier die on board the Petersburg, how could Anton not think of his own inevitable end? Nor had he forgotten Anna and Kolia: in March 1891 he put in his new notebook: ‘The trouble is that both these deaths (A. and N.) are not an accident and not an event in human life, but an ordinary thing.’

  On 7 January Anton went to Petersburg for three weeks, Shcheglov could see that he ‘was ailing’, but Anton wanted a ‘feast in the time of plague’. On arrival he went with Svobodin to Shcheglov’s name-day party, and panicked the gathering: he was announced as an emissary of the Chief of Police. Anton became drunk and arrogant. Shcheglov records words4 that foreshadow Chekhov’s Dr Astrov (in Uncle Vania) who, drunk, ‘does the most difficult operations and has his own philosophy’. He boasted that he would seduce his Petersburg admirer, the virtuous Lidia Avilova. He laid down the law to Shcheglov: ‘The theatre should be like the church – the same for the peasant and the general … You ought to have an affair with a dark-ski
nned woman.’ The next day Anton saw Tolstoy’s comedy Fruits of Enlightenment. Stanislavsky directed it, and Vera Komissarzhevskaia made her début. Anton had no idea who they were. Carousing with friends, Anton exhausted himself and his hosts.

  The Suvorins’ telephone broke down under the strain of Anton’s social whirl. Anton evaded Kleopatra, but took up with another actress, Daria Musina-Pushkina, once of Masha’s circle. Daria had come to Petersburg to escape her fiancé and meet another suitor. She lived in the same building as the Suvorins, and was eager to have Anton as an escort. Daria besieged Anton with notes:

  Listen, cockroach, I couldn’t resist the temptation and am coming to Svobodin’s … I won’t deny that I’d very much like you to come and fetch me, not me fetch you, but I know how stubborn you are …

  Darling Anton, if you came and saw me right now, how I should thank you, because I’m alone, terribly unhappy.

  Little cockroach, aren’t you ashamed to ask if it’s too late? Remember the saying: ‘better late than never.’ … But all the same you’re better than I thought. Cicada. I expect you – you’d better come!5