Anton Chekhov

by Donald Rayfield

  Noble, decent Lika! As soon as you wrote to me that my letters did not tie me in any way, I breathed a sigh of relief and now I am writing you a long letter without fear of some aunt seeing these lines and marrying me to a monster like you … Do you dream of Levitan and his black eyes full of African passion? Are you still getting letters from my 70-year-old rival and hypocritically answering them? A big crocodile is inside you, Lika, and really I do well to follow common sense and not my heart, which you have bitten. Get away from me! Or no, Lika, whatever the consequences, let your perfume make my head spin and help me tighten the lasso you have thrown round my neck … don’t forget your victim, The King of the Medes

  On 2 July 1892 Lika wrote: ‘Why do you want so intensely to remind me of Levitan and my “dreams”? I think about nobody. I want nobody and I need nobody.’ And the next day: ‘O how I’d like (if I could) to tighten the lasso as hard as I can! But I’ve bitten off more than I can chew! For the first time in life I have no luck!’

  On 16 July Anton teased her mercilessly about growing old in a ménage-à-trois with a balding Levitan and a hard-drinking Kuvshinnikova. He invited Lika to Melikhovo: the cholera had attracted interesting young men. He promised to knock bad habits out of her. ‘Above all I shall shield you from Sappho.’ After refusing to travel with her, Anton now mused about going to the Crimea on his own. She spent August, furious, with Granny at the family estate, Pokrovskoe. Lika summed up Anton, the summer and cholera on 3 August: ‘The cholera hasn’t come yet … Anyway, I doubt if you’ll move yourself for anyone, especially not for me – well, I’m not offended! Farewell.’ One of Anton’s replies was too abusive to send. Lika distracted herself with suitors. She wrote to Masha on 18 July: ‘In Moscow I’ve been seeing all my lovers (excuse the expression, but it’s your brother’s).’3 Nevertheless, Pavel’s diary records,4 she travelled 150 miles from Pokrovskoe to Melikhovo to see Anton on 14 September. Whatever transpired, they stopped writing to each other for three weeks.

  As soon as Lika retreated, another woman desperately in love with Anton asserted herself. Aleksandra Pokhlebina, ‘Vermicelli’, was very determined. A piano teacher who tied brass weights to her pupils’ wrists and elbows, she turned the screw on Anton:

  Half the summer has passed and nothing has been talked over … You might have forgotten about my existence, there is nothing amazing about that, but once it is an affair of the heart, I felt it can’t be forgotten … I think you will not wish to embarrass me in front of my family.5

  On 3 August, after an evasive response, she wrote again:

  So you’re fed up with me! I can just imagine you looking at the signature and saying Oh My God, she’s writing again. Unfortunately for you I care too much about you.

  She had no reply, and wrote on 28 August:

  I rather need to see you – yesterday I had a letter from my family and I have something to tell you about business … Yesterday I saw Masha and I heard from her a great many unpleasant things about you.

  Anton said nothing, and Pokhlebina smouldered. Olga Kundasova lost control. Established with Dr Pavlovskaia nearby, she made two brief visits to Anton that summer. On 25 August her letter about medical matters veered towards the personal:

  Come on Friday and Saturday with Masha, I can assure you by all that is dear to me in this world that you will feel better at my place than I did at yours. Really, was it worth my coming for the sessions you awarded me?

  Anton was not the only member of the household to fear the post. On the same day Smagin wrote to Masha with similar passionate resentment. He resigned his post as country magistrate, he complained of consumption. Smagin was equally scared of a visit and of a final breach. He wrote to Masha on 19 August 1892:

  I still haven’t forgotten the reception I had in March in Moscow province. Your request about burning your letters I shall not carry out, and in the event of my death I shall make arrangements … You can rest at ease: nobody will dare to read a single line of yours. You are very unkind.

  Three women judged the right tone to take with Anton: Natalia Lintvariova, Vania’s fiancée Aleksandra Liosova and Misha’s love, Countess Mamuna. Liosova concealed her interest in Anton. Mamuna made a joke of hers. On 15 September she wrote: ‘Why not see me in Moscow and share my isolation? … It’s not bad to be carried away by both Chekhov brothers!!!’6 Misha, Masha and the Chekhov parents brought harmony into Melikhovo. Morning and evening Pavel recorded in the family diary the outside temperature. An odourless earth closet was installed; the Chekhovs acquired pigs, calves and a pair of prolific Romanov sheep. Gherkins were pickled; potatoes were buried for the winter; double glazing was fitted; the Assumption and Dormition were celebrated with a liturgy. Misha lauded Cincinnatus’s realm in a letter to cousin Georgi in Taganrog:

  I have six horses here, we shall go riding, I shall take you over our virgin forests where you can go for three miles and all the land is ours. My rye is magnificent, but the oats and grass have been burnt by the heat and drought, while my sister’s kitchen garden is a wonder to behold; she has 800 head just of cabbage. We have made hay … and if you could see the cartloads come into the yard and it being piled into stacks!7

  Misha wrote to Uncle Mitrofan on 7 October 1892:

  Antosha is sitting in his room and has locked himself in, he is stoking the stove, the stove is warming up and he is freezing. He’ll freeze and freeze then come out and say, ‘What weather! Mama, isn’t it time for supper?’

  Misha tended to paint a rosy picture. He did not mention the servants. Two were dismissed – Pelageia had been robbing family and guests, and Daria had murdered the goslings – and others were hired – Olga and two pert Aniutas, Chufarova and Naryshkina. Vania and Aleksandr could not share Anton’s life among the country gentry. Vania was now head teacher at a Moscow school, on the Basmannaia, a post he held for years to come. Pavel set off to Petersburg to stay with Aleksandr; on the way he reported Vania’s privations to Anton:

  he has a room for visitors, but you have to sleep on the floor, his bedstead was left at Melikhovo … and he can’t buy one, he has no money. Vania acts energetically at his school, putting everything in order, trying hard. The school is terribly neglected, there is dirt everywhere, the walls, the floors, the window frames are old and frail and the double glazing hasn’t been put in yet. He runs round all the classrooms alone and gives the women teachers instructions, they at first looked askance.8

  Using a free railway ticket from Gavrilov and posing as a Customs official, Pavel arrived in Petersburg. He saw little of Aleksandr and his children but he attended every important church service in the city. He stayed for more than two weeks. Although he tolerated his daughter-in-law, conflicts arose, Aleksandr reported, over the soup, in which Natalia boiled one onion, for which both Pavel and Natalia’s mother, Gagara, fought. Aleksandr was drinking less, but poverty bothered him. He asked Suvorin to increase his 5 kopecks per line. Suvorin merely scribbled on the request: ‘Who among my reporters [apart from you] is paid a salary?’9

  Anton neglected literature, but in Moscow Pavel Svobodin ensured that his name still appeared in print. After ‘Ward No. 6’, Russian Thought was to print ‘An Anonymous Story’. (Both stories had been written a year before.) Anton found another editor – Chertkov, grandson of the man who had sold the Chekhov family their freedom. This Chertkov, Tolstoy’s closest acolyte, published reprints for the masses and, despite poor recompense and poor proof-reading, Chekhov sold him the more radical stories. Monthly journals gave Anton large advances, to shame him into writing. Despite the cost of rebuilding Melikhovo, the income from advances and Chertkov’s reprints kept Chekhov solvent. Anton was grateful for Svobodin’s selfless work in placing Anton’s stories with Russian Thought: ‘serious illness has forced him to undergo a spiritual metamorphosis,’ he told Suvorin. Svobodin handled the tricky withdrawal and re-offering of ‘Ward No. 6’, and he offered Anton sympathy. He complained only of the theatre, saying he acted only to pay ‘tailors, butcher
s, decorators, lamp-makers, cabs, innkeepers and loan-sharks’. On 9 October 1892, Suvorin wired Anton: ‘Svobodin just died during performance play Jokers come dear boy.’

  Notes

  1 In remoter areas peasants believed that doctors were deliberately spreading cholera: in Samara, on the Volga, they killed one doctor and drove the others out.

  2 Petrov was a shop assistant in Muir and Mirrielees, the Moscow store where the Chekhovs ordered everything from crockery to rifles. Sixteen years earlier, at Petrov’s wedding in Kaluga, Aleksandr, Kolia and Masha had been poor relatives: now the scales had tipped the other way.

  3 See OR, 331 93 78: Lika Mizinova’s letters to Masha Chekhova, 1891–3.

  4 Pavel began a diary on arrival in Melikhovo: it records comings and goings, the weather, and incidents, odd and banal. See A. P. Kuzicheva, E. M. Sakharova Melikhovskii letopisets, 1995.

  5 See OR, 331 56 38: A. A. Pokhlebina’s letters to Anton, 1892–8: 10 July 1892.

  6 See OR, 331 51 12: Klara Mamuna’s letter to Anton.

  7 See LN68, 855–870: E. Z. Balabanovich, Chekhov v pis’makh brata …: letter of 26 June 1892.

  8 See OR, 331 81 21: Pavel Chekhov’s letters to Anton, 1886–96.

  9 See RGALI, 459 1 4617: Aleksandr’s letters to A. S. Suvorin, 1888–96: 13 July 1892.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Summoned by Suvorin

  October 1892–January 1893

  THE ILLEGITIMATE SON of a groom, Svobodin had dominated the Petersburg stage. He died from TB at the age of forty-two. Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko was there:

  Svobodin fell down in the doorway. Perhaps the audience took this to be an extra effect, not in the stage directions. It was the first deadly attack. Svobodin still had enough strength to come out for two curtain calls. Then he went to his dressing room, began changing for the last act and suddenly, clutching his throat, shouting ‘Tear it, tear it’ fell on his back.

  Anton was handed Suvorin’s telegram as he left for his clinic. He told Suvorin of Svobodin’s love for him, rather than his for the actor, and he did not go to the funeral. He had attended too many. In Petersburg he wanted to talk only to Suvorin. In any case, cholera required him to stay: new cases had occurred only eighteen miles away.

  In Petersburg Pavel, an eager mourner, told Anton on 12 October 1892:

  I attended Requiems twice with the numerous presence of his admirers at the Volkovo cemetery, the sung requiem was solemn … for his two visits to us at Melikhovo I said a heartfelt prayer for his soul’s peace … The last time he had not wanted to leave us, he kept taking his leave …

  Aleksandr and his family send their regards and he asks you to sell him 12 to 15 acres of land to build a House just in case for his family, for his family is multiplying and he proposes to make himself a settlement. I am very pleased that sobriety, love, harmony, peace and calm have settled in their family. God grant that we be the same.

  Aleksandr had forsworn not only alcohol, but also meat. Anton’s publication in the ‘enemy’ Russian Thought made Aleksandr fear for his job, all the more since Suvorin, sliding into depression, was letting his paper slip into the hands of the Dauphin, who loathed Aleksandr. Anton had to mend fences with Suvorin: over eighteen months he had written nothing for him.

  Anton was content among the peasantry, his Serpukhov colleagues, and even his neighbours. Only police officials repelled him. Siren voices called Anton to Moscow. Lika was desperate for comfort. On 8 October she broke her silence and appealed:

  I am burning my life, come and help as soon as possible burn it out, because the sooner the better … You used to say that you loved immoral women – so you won’t be bored with me, either. Even though you won’t answer my letters, now perhaps you will write something, because writing to a woman such as I’m becoming really doesn’t put you under any obligations, and anyway I am dying, perishing day by day and all par dépit. Oh, save me and come! Till we meet. L. Mizinova.

  Vania had cleaned up his school house, and the Chekhovs had accommodation. On 15 October 1892, when cholera was declared vanquished, Anton came to Moscow for two days. He dined with his editors and erstwhile enemies, Vukol Lavrov and Viktor Goltsev, but spurned Gruzinsky and Ezhov. He must have contacted Lika, for at the weekend, classes over, Lika and Masha left for Melikhovo, followed by Anton with Pavel.

  Lika had, however, received little comfort. Anton told Suvorin that he was bored without ‘strong love’, and Smagin ‘there are no new attachments and the old are gone rusty’. Anton wanted to travel even further than in 1890: he would write all winter to earn the fare to Chicago to visit, with the Dauphin, the 1893 International Exhibition. First he had to go to Petersburg. Anna Suvorina summoned him twice:

  Anton, has my image utterly vanished from your heart? Do you really not want to see me? I suddenly felt a terrible desire to meet you and talk … Can you really not get over Lenochka Pleshcheeva choosing somebody else? Well it was all your own fault and who could have supposed afterwards!!! Come, my dear Anton, I’ll find you a bride here.1

  The next day (26 October) Anna wrote:

  … now I’m writing seriously with an outright demand that you come. Aleksei [Suvorin] is unwell, he has fainting fits, Liolia [the Dauphin] and I are at our wits’ end and awfully worried. We ask you to help us.

  Anton did not come. He told Suvorin, in the callous tone of the doctors in his plays, to take valerian, and to carry a folding chair wherever he went. Suvorin’s desperate reply, however, panicked Anton. He told Shcheglov that he was rushing to Suvorin’s bedside, for fear of a death ‘that would age me about ten years’. On 30 October 1892 Anton went to Petersburg. News of Suvorin’s illness spread through Moscow.2

  Anton found Suvorin physically well: the only visible cause for depression was that the ceiling of his mansion had collapsed. He and Anton talked, drank and ate oysters.3 When Suvorin fell silent, Anton reviewed manuscripts for the Dauphin. One was a ghastly survey by Dr Sviatlovsky called How Doctors Live and Die – suicide, tuberculosis and typhus.

  Back in Moscow on 7 November, Anton felt ill: to save money he had travelled third class, and was choked by cigar smoke. The road to Melikhovo, now under snow, was passable, and the next weekend the Chekhov brothers’ women friends, Lika, Countess Mamuna and Aleksandra Liosova, descended. Lika did not enjoy her stay: she was sought out only by Countess Mamuna, who did not want to be alone with Misha. Lika returned to Moscow with Masha the following Tuesday. In Moscow she met a new friend of Anton’s, the young poetess Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik. This was a new blow to Lika, and her letters, by late November, become plaintive: ‘I am annoyed that I … went to Melikhovo … and again I have no idea where to get away from anguish and the realization that no one needs me.’ Anton refused to respond seriously: Masha had seen Lika at a symphony concert in a new blue dress. He answered with a spoof from one of ‘Lika’s Lovers’ to another:

  Trofim! If you, you son of a bitch, don’t stop chasing after Lika, then, you sod, I shall stick a corkscrew up the bit of you that rhymes with farce. You turd! Don’t you know L. is mine and that we have two children?

  As November ended blizzards cut Melikhovo off. Anton wrote The Island of Sakhalin and reports on the Tolokonnikovs’ tannery at the nearby village of Kriukovo. Lika’s phrase, par dépit, also inspired him. He began ‘Big Volodia and Little Volodia’: a young woman, married par dépit to an older man, is seduced by a younger man. Neither loves her. That freezing week Anton wrote a passionate apologia for his own ‘mediocrity’ to Suvorin. (Suvorin had read ‘Ward No. 6’ with all the more distaste because it was in Russian Thought.)

  You are a hardened drunkard and I have treated you to sweet lemonade and while you grant lemonade its due, you rightly note that lemonade has no spirit. There is none of the alcohol which would make you drunk and enthralled … The reasons are not stupidity or mediocrity or arrogance, as Burenin thinks, but a disease worse for an artist than syphilis and sexual exhaustion. We haven’t got ‘it’, true, and so,
if you lift up our muse’s skirt, you will find a flat place. Remember, that writers whom we call great or just good and who make us drunk have one common, very important feature: they are going somewhere and calling you with them, and you feel not with your mind but your whole being that they have a goal, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father.

  Suvorin was so bewildered by the letter that he asked his Petersburg crony, Sazonova, if Chekhov had gone mad. Sazonova, yet another Petersburg woman who did not take to Anton, wrote in her diary that, on the contrary, Chekhov was ‘all there’; to Suvorin she berated Chekhov for not taking life as it came. Suvorin sent her letter to Anton, who sneered that Sazonova was ‘a person who is far from life-enhancing’.

  December’s stiller weather brought fresh company every day – old friends like Kundasova, as well as casual visitors who shamelessly ate the Chekhovs’ food, bedded down in their drawing room and bearded the writer in his den. Suvorin, addicted to painkillers, now appealed for help. Anton went back to Petersburg. On 20 December, as blizzards hit Melikhovo, he came into the warm. He stayed away from family and Moscow for over five weeks – well past his name day. Anton brought Suvorin his last gasp for New Times, a Christmas story called ‘Fears’. He dined with Leikin. Moscow friends were hurt that Anton did not even mention his passing through. In Moscow he called on Lika and Masha for a few minutes only, but took the actress Zankovetskaia to the music hall.4 He did not warn Aleksandr and Natalia that he was coming to Petersburg.

  Anton wrote to Lika, inviting her to Petersburg, knowing full well that she was too shy to come to the Suvorins, with whom Chekhov so frankly discussed his private affairs. Anton taunted her: he was dreaming of Countess Mamuna, he liked the idea of telling his friends that a blonde was being unfaithful to him. On 28 December he enclosed a newspaper cutting, should Lika wish to marry ‘par dépit’: