Anton Chekhov

by Donald Rayfield

  In late April the starving cows and sheep left the sheds to graze with the communal flocks. Ploughing and sowing started. The Chekhov family was up from dawn to dusk. Warm weather brought patients with sores, wounds and mental illness. Epidemics of scarlet fever and measles raged; it was also a critical time for tuberculosis victims. Anton barely mentioned his own cough, but wrote about his patients. The Tolokonnikovs, peasants turned mill-owners, disgusted him: after a vigorously celebrated marriage Chekhov was summoned urgently for the couple’s inflamed genitals; another old man demanded treatment for his aching balls after marrying a young bride.

  Once again the authorities feared cholera, and Anton was asked not to leave the district for more than a few days. This time the council paid for an assistant, a feldsheritsa (paramedic) called Maria Arkadakskaia. Her notes alarmed Anton. On 11 July she wrote ‘send me cocaine, my teeth are killing me’. By August, when cholera was only twelve miles away, Maria was so addicted to morphine that Chekhov could not leave her in charge for a day. In early August he put her in Iakovenko’s asylum at Meshcherskoe – Iakovenko took only Anton’s more interesting cases – and coped alone. Anton needed morphine too, he told Franz Schechtel on 19 April 1893: ‘I have hæmorrhoids, awful, like grapes, growing in bunches from my behind … from the part of me which my father used to thrash.’ He steeled himself for an operation in Moscow but became too ill to travel:

  I have two dozen or so diseases, with hæmorrhoids the main one. Hæmorrhoids make the whole body very irritated. These ailments affect one’s psyche in the most undesirable way: I am irritated, I turn nasty etc. I am treating it by celibacy and solitude…1

  Hæmorrhoids were his excuse for not seeing Lika: ‘a general’s disease – can’t travel,’ he told her. The dachshunds, not Lika, were caressed that spring.

  Anton complained to Aleksandr that Suvorin was not getting his letters. The Dauphin demanded that Anton edit Aleksandr’s copy for New Times, but the brothers would not let the Dauphin sow discord between them. That summer they were closer. Aleksandr was unhappy with Natalia, and saw her and the children only at weekends forty miles outside Petersburg. After five months without alcohol, he was suffering again from ‘ambulatory typhus’, and from toothache, which he treated with a mixture of resin, ether, ammonia and menthol that Anton prescribed. For Anton’s ills Aleksandr, on 15 May, prescribed marriage:

  When you decide to get ‘hitched’, then things will be fine up top. A wife must not argue. ‘Shut up!’ deals with that … All you have to do is follow the general law, submit to Aunt Liudmila’s desires and take some lessons in God-fearing coitus from Uncle Mitrofan.

  Aleksandr came to Melikhovo for a week in June: he found the suppressed unhappiness of its inhabitants unbearable. On 9 June 1893, as he waited at Lopasnia for the train to Moscow and Petersburg, he scribbled a rambling letter (which Lika, who was arriving, took with her to Melikhovo):

  I left Melikhovo without saying goodbye to the Tramontano [their nickname for Pavel]. He was asleep, so let him be. May he dream of smoked sturgeons and olives … I suffered all the time I watched you, the foul way you live … In [mother’s] opinion you are a sick man … and the dogs, damn them, she isn’t going to feed them any more … The only way to stop all these misunderstandings and mutual insults, tears, inevitable suffering, muffled sighs and bitter tears is your final decision, only your departure. Mother absolutely can’t understand you and never will … Throw everything up: your dreams of the country, your love of Melikhovo and the labour and feelings … What sense is there in the Tramontani eating up your soul as rats eat tallow candles? … You and our sister have a false relationship. One kind word from you with a sincere note and she is all yours … Lika is approaching. I have to finish.

  After Aleksandr had gone (leaving in the new pond a bottle with a polyglot message from a shipwreck), Evgenia went to a convent for three days’ retreat. Only those who were closest to Anton, as was Aleksandr, understood how irritable physical pain, mental stress and loneliness made him and how much he could, without intending to, torment his mother and sister.

  In summer 1893 Anton wrote almost nothing new. He denied that he was writing a comedy about Siberian exiles and their jailors. He kept up his reputation with old work. When Russian Thought published ‘An Anonymous Story’, in March 1893, few readers knew that Chekhov had abandoned it five years before, before taking it up again, because of its political theme. A revolutionary (the anonymous narrator) is planted as a servant to spy on a minister’s son, but reneges on his mission and elopes with his target’s mistress, who dies abroad of TB (only three heroines in all Chekhov’s mature work die, and two of TB). When the narrator returns to Russia, he surrenders the heroine’s baby girl to the enemy. ‘An Anonymous Story’ is Chekhov’s only story with revolutionaries, aristocratic protagonists, or a Petersburg setting: the work is more like Turgenev’s than Chekhov’s. Anton’s own world is better reflected in ‘Big Volodia and Little Volodia’, whose forlorn heroine might have suggested to Lika Mizinova that she was Anton’s raw material, not muse. Many more times she would see her vulnerable character and unlucky fate mirrored, even anticipated, in Anton’s fiction.

  In 1893 Anton’s reading was as important as his writing. Zola’s novel Dr Pascal was serialized in Russia. Dr Pascal devotes himself to the welfare of mankind, defending humanism against the Christian piety of his niece Clotilde. She nevertheless comforts him and becomes his mistress. Anton’s life at Melikhovo with Masha seemed to outsiders an idealization of Dr Pascal. No wonder that he discussed the novel heatedly with Suvorin, once communication between them was reestablished. There was one ‘happy’ event at Melikhovo: on 9 July Vania married Sofia in the local church. Six weeks later, Anton was telling Suvorin that he felt crowded by the presence of Vania, his wife and the homeless flautist Ivanenko. Real inspiration visited Anton once, after a heavy dinner. He awoke from a nightmare, telling Misha he had dreamt of a black monk. Into ‘The Black Monk’ he wrote at the end of 1893 comes imagery from his orchard, where workmen desperately tried to shield the blossom from frost. A story of overwork leading to madness and TB, it shows Vsevolod Garshin’s ghost working on Chekhov. It needed a musical theme for the plot to crystallize.

  The bringer of music to Melikhovo in August 1893 was Ignati Potapenko, and the bringer of Potapenko was Suvorin. By May Suvorin was in Paris, seeking distraction in Le Moulin Rouge, with the doctors of La Salpêtrière, or in jewellers’ shops. Only on 7/19 June does his diary show animation:

  Back at my hotel I found a letter from Potapenko asking me for 300–400 roubles. Today I gave him 300 roubles … Maria [Potapenko’s second wife] … said that she needed treatment, some operation had to be done, but they had no money. Potapenko works a lot, far too hard, and doesn’t conceal from himself that this is wearing him out; but he works fast.

  Potapenko invited himself and Sergeenko to Melikhovo. Anton groaned: he recalled Sergeenko taking him to see Potapenko,’ ‘the god of boredom’, in 1889. Sergeenko had proved unmitigated tedium – all 1893 he had urged Anton to make a pilgrimage with him to see Tolstoy. Anton resisted, fleeing a Moscow bathhouse when he found that Tolstoy was there. He wanted to see Tolstoy alone, and hid from Sergeenko and even Tolstoy’s son, Liovushka.

  Patients died. A rainy summer washed away the harvest. With Sergeenko, Potapenko arrived on 1 August and, as the god of amusement, lightened Anton’s gloom. He plunged into everything, even the muddy pond Anton had dug. Anton recanted to Suvorin (who warned that Potapenko might be a crook): ‘My Odessa impression misled me … Potapenko sings very nicely and plays the violin, he and I had a very interesting time, quite apart from the violin and drawing room songs.’ In Anton’s phrase, the ‘crow’ of Odessa had become the ‘eagle’ of Moscow. Anton talked as intimately to him as to Suvorin. Potapenko became an alter ego in a few days. He fell under Anton’s spell and respected his secrets. Potapenko recalled:

  The head of the house was Anton. His tastes dominated everything,
everything was done to please him. He treated his mother with tenderness, but showed his father only filial respect … And he said that his father had been a cruel man … He had cast a pall on his childhood and aroused in his soul a protest against the despotic imposition of belief.2

  Anton, for all his memories of enforced church services, sang with Potapenko: ‘not love songs but church music … He had a fairly resonant bass. He knew the liturgy extremely well and loved improvising a family choir.’ Again, as she had used Levitan, Lika used Potapenko to arouse Anton. Lika joined the men, singing to the accompaniment of Potapenko’s violin. The music was Braga’s ‘Wallachian Legend’. The main motif of ‘The Black Monk’ was born, and the form too, for as Shostakovich noted, ‘The Black Monk’ has a perfect sonata form. Potapenko and Lika were thrown together; other harmonies, as ominous as those of Braga’s ‘Legend’, were born.

  That summer Potapenko was a deus ex machina in many of Anton’s plots. In Petersburg he made Suvorin’s accountants recalculate Anton’s debt: instead of owing Suvorin 3482 roubles, Anton found he was owed 2000 and could abandon a plan to sell Suvorin ten years’ rights to his books.3 Potapenko prided himself on extracting money from publishers. He was paying for a sick second wife in Paris and an embittered first wife in the Crimea. Potapenko’s unsinkable temperament made all problems, even Anton’s, a pretext for merriment. He made things work. Anton’s hæmorrhoids, coughing, and the depression, which Aleksandr’s letter had tried to pinpoint, vanished.

  On 30 July/11 August, in Stuttgart, coming home, Suvorin wrote a poem that showed in what deep gulfs he was drowning. It ends:

  I feel the flies are crawling

  Over the membrane of my brain …

  ‘It’s not flies sitting in your head,’

  The surgeon answers with a laugh.

  ‘Old age has come, and your brain

  Is being eaten all the time

  While water is filling up the holes.’

  Suvorin reached Petersburg in August; he described his symptoms to Anton. Anton told him not to worry and Suvorin took the train, alone, back to western Europe.

  Notes

  1 Anton’s letter to Gorbunov-Posadov, Chertkov’s editor, 26 Apr. 1893.

  2 Potapenko’s memoirs are in V vospominaniiakh.

  3 Suvorin was not intentionally cheating Anton, but New Times had notoriously bad bookkeeping.

  FORTY-ONE

  Happy Avelan

  October–December 1893

  NOT UNTIL LATE OCTOBER could Chekhov visit Moscow. He made only day trips to Serpukhov, to council meetings, or to meet Olga Kundasova. After Potapenko’s arrival, his mood remained buoyant, despite the washed-out harvest. A new well was dug; fish swam in the new pond; there were watermelons from the kitchen garden. Russian Thought began serial publication of The Island of Sakhalin. (Its publication as a book was to come afterwards.) Despite its understated quality, it earned Chekhov esteem: he was now a conscience for the nation, like Tolstoy.

  The desire to revisit Petersburg receded – Anton was not to go there for nearly two years. Suvorin was abroad, talking to novelists he published in Russia: Zola and Daudet. Aleksandr, after being so outspoken, was ignored. After Potapenko, Anton was seeking new confidants and setting aside old friends. He was apparently unmoved when the poet Pleshcheev died of a stroke in Paris. Some of the women who loved Anton recognized a change, and stood back: in autumn 1893 Olga Kundasova wrote:

  (25 September) I don’t think it’s bad for you to be in solitude.

  (17 November) I want, and I don’t want, to visit you. One lives mostly on illusions and feels even worse when they scatter. Devoted to you with all my soul, Kund.

  Both Olga Kundasova and Suvorin recognized that they had in common not only a love for Anton, but symptoms of mental illness, manic depression. Kundasova sought treatment, while Suvorin sought distraction. Despite their diametrically opposed political views, Kundasova and Suvorin had respect, even affection, for each other and, for the next decade, gave each other support. Suvorin’s support was monetary, which Olga nearly choked on. ‘Don’t think that I am charmed by the prospects of free provision at others’ expense.’1

  Another woman also withdrew from Anton on 16 October 1893: ‘I feel I shall write a lot of various stupid things today, so – farewell! With far more than respect, Aleksandra Pokhlebina.’

  Once autumn came, Lika visited less often. A more varied social life, as well as teaching in the Rzhevskaia School, kept her in Moscow. Acolytes also retreated. Bilibin, Shcheglov and Gruzinsky all felt neglected. Ezhov was becoming demented: ‘Critics have started leaping from behind gates, biting my trousers … I’ve become a complete swine and write to you like a drunken peasant.’2 All editors slammed their doors in Ezhov’s face after he offered Amusement a sketch called ‘The Sad Boy’. Two women ask a street urchin where he lives: ‘“In a cunt,” replied the rude boy and went his way.’

  Grim news came from Petersburg. On 25 October Tchaikovsky died, apparently of cholera. Suvorin, who recorded every scrap of gossip, had noted Tchaikovsky living as man and ‘wife’ with the poet Apukhtin, but heard not a whisper about suicide or homosexual scandal. All Russia felt bereaved and blamed, if anyone, Dr Bertenson who failed to save the composer. Anton took Tchaikovsky’s death as calmly as Pleshcheev’s. On the same day he heard from Aleksandr of his own demise:

  You, my friend, are dangerously ill with consumption and will soon die. Rest in peace! Today Leikin came to our office with this sad news … he shed bitter tears while he spoke, claiming that you had confided to him alone in the world the tale of your so early extinction from an incurable ailment.

  Aleksandr warned Anton that if he didn’t die soon, he would be accused of publicity-seeking.

  Anton leapt into action as if to scotch the rumours and to live to the full. On 27 October 1893 he broke free to Moscow and stayed until 7 November. On 25 November he was back in Moscow for four weeks, ostensibly to read the proofs of Sakhalin. In Moscow Anton had a new nickname, ‘Happy Avelan’. In France the Russian Admiral Avelan was received with Bacchic hospitality, to celebrate the new Franco-Russian alliance. Anton, like Admiral Avelan, began to relish wine, acclaim and beautiful women. Lika’s happiness was soon undermined by the knowledge that she was now one of several women in Anton’s life.

  Anton-Avelan’s ‘squadron’ included Potapenko, Sergeenko, the superman-reporter Uncle Giliai (Giliarovsky) and the wheezing editor of The Performing Artist, Kumanin (whose life the squadron’s expeditions shortened). They haunted the Loskutnaia, Louvre and Madrid hotels. They were entertained by Lika and her friend, the budding opera singer, Varia Eberle. Two women from Kiev also joined them.

  One was Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik. Nineteen years old, less than five foot tall, the daughter of a rake, the lawyer Kupernik, she had the blood of Russia’s great actor Shchepkin in her veins. She was already famed as a verse translator from French and English: she singled out plays with a strong female role – Sappho, The Taming of the Shrew, The Distant Princess. She was a Sapphic love poet. Misha Chekhov already knew her; now she moved into Anton’s life. Tania charmed men, too, and Anton would value her above any other woman writer. She was called ‘topsy-turvy’ (kuvyrkom sounded like Kupernik) for her impetuosity.

  Tania lived in the Hotel Madrid, which was linked to the Hotel Louvre through corridors (known as the ‘catacombs’ or ‘Pyrenees’). In the Hotel Louvre lived the love of Tania’s life, also from Kiev, the twenty-three-year-old actress Lidia Iavorskaia. Their love affair began as loudly as it ended: Tania had come to deny that she had slandered Lidia in Kiev. For 1893 an 1894, Lidia’s heart was Tania’s, although she devoted the rest of her person to her manager, Korsh (of the Korsh theatre), to a lover in the Customs Department, to Anton Chekhov and, perhaps, to Ignati Potapenko. Like Tania, Iavorskaia was a vivacious polyglot. Her background was darker. Her father, Hübbenett, of Huguenot origin, was Chief of Police in Kiev and, like her, promiscuous, self-important, vindictive, y
et generous. Hübbenett helped Iavorskaia literally to force herself on stage. Sensuality made up for shallowness. In Moscow she hypnotized Korsh into hiring her as La Dame aux camélias. Lidia Iavorskaia stormed through Anton’s life: she aroused both lust and disgust in him. The ‘sirens of the Louvre’, however, romped with Isaak Levitan, who called them his ‘little girls’, and Anton found this off-putting.

  Avelan’s expeditions to theatres, restaurants and long sessions in hotel rooms were fuelled by the passion between Tania and Lidia Iavorskaia. Iavorskaia destroyed Tania’s letters; Tania kept everything. Bits of paper and card, in Russian and French, in prose and verse, show Lidia responding to the poetess’s affection:

  let’s go … I await you. I kiss you as strongly as I love you. Lidia … Cette nuit d’Athènes était belle. Le beau est inoubliable. Cher poète, si vous saviez quel mal de tête …

  J’attends le vice suprême et je vous envoie votre dot.

  Ma petite Sappho. Venez immédiatement, urgent…3

  Anton saw Lidia act Napoleon’s mistress Katrina Hubsche in Sardou’s Madame Sans-Gêne. He raved to Suvorin on 11 November 1893:

  I spent two weeks in intoxication. Because my life in Moscow has been nothing but feasts and new friendships, they call me Avelan to tease me. Never before have I felt so free. Firstly, I have no flat – I can live where I want, secondly, I still haven’t got my passport and … girls, girls, girls … Recently frivolity has taken me over and I feel drawn to people as never before, and literature has become my Abishag [King David’s comforter]