In the same letter Anton asserted that all thinkers are impotent by forty: sexual potency, he implied, was for savages, even though he hoped, in Apuleius’ phrase, to go on ‘drawing his bow’.
Both Tania and Lidia did their best. After he left on 7 November Tania sent him a poem (drafted on the back of one of Lidia’s love-letters to her):
All, all our dreams see Avelan
All that we see recalls this man,
Through the rosy mist he looms
And quietly sails into our rooms.4
Tania wrote her Avelan notes on Lidia’s behalf as her own. One sent to room No. 54 at the end of November runs: ‘Perhaps you will honour with your presence the modest room No. 8. And I shan’t say how happy the hostess will be. Tatiana K.’ Iavorskaia set her sights on Anton and frightened Lika. Lika enjoyed the party, and even added her phrases to joint messages to Anton, but, embarrassed, humiliated, even shocked, she now wanted out. Anton had that summer claimed he was too old to be a lover; now she saw him in thrall to the ‘sirens of the Louvre’. On 2 November she fired across his bows:
I also know your attitude – either condescending pity or complete neglect … don’t invite me to your place – don’t meet me! – that’s not so important for you, but it may help me to forget you. I cannot leave earlier than December or January – otherwise I would go now …
Two days later, when Anton was back in Melikhovo, Lika wrote:
I got to bed at 8 a.m. Mme Iavorskaia was with us, she said that Chekhov is a charmer and that she definitely intended to marry him, she asked me to help and I promised to do everything for your mutual happiness. You are so nice and accessible that I thought I wouldn’t find it hard.
Lidia met Anton at Masha’s empty flat (Masha was in Melikhovo). In spring 1894 she recalled the talk they had one November night:
I was fleeing a man who was harassing me and I threw myself on your hospitality … You kept asking me ‘what was I after?’ When revulsion and pity for the man battled inside me, you, an artist, as a psychologist, as a human being, told me about a person’s right to dispose of their affections, to love or not to love, freely submitting to inner feeling.5
Lidia Iavorskaia extracted a promise of a play for her, to be called Daydreams.
The sirens had made Anton forget Suvorin. He wrote on 28 November: ‘For mysterious reasons I shall not stay with you but in the Hotel Russia on the Moika.’ Suvorin was badly upset. A draft of his reply runs:
30 November 1893. 7 a.m. Yes, 7 a.m. Things are bad, dear boy, I don’t sleep at all and I don’t know how and when it will end … When can I summon you to Petersburg? Well, if you stay in the Hotel Russia in the back and beyond, might you not as well be in Moscow, from my point of view, at least? It may be more advantageous for you, though I don’t think we were much bother to you, but this really is hateful to me …6
Anton’s next letter to Suvorin was a kick in the teeth. He had met the Moscow publisher Sytin and liked ‘the only publishing firm in Russia that has a Russian smell about it and doesn’t push the peasant-customer about’. He drew up a contract with Sytin, receiving 2300 roubles for the book rights to old stories. Anton’s publications were now in Moscow, not Petersburg, journals. The new editor of The Northern Herald, Liubov Gurevich, gave up all hope of persuading Chekhov to give the journal a major work: in November 1893, to Chekhov’s fury – he cursed her Jewishness – she insisted on immediate repayment of 400 roubles she had advanced: Anton telegraphed Suvorin, who paid without demurring. Anton rarely paid back an advance. Shcheglov’s diary boasts: ‘There are four kings of advances: me, Chekhov, Potapenko and Sergeenko.’7
On 19 December, Anton felt ill. He stood Lika up – she had expected to see him – and left for Melikhovo. The clan gathered: Vania brought Sofia down. Lika was invited for the holidays. Her acceptance of 23 December 1893 had a new name in it, Ignati Potapenko’s:
Dear [crossed out: Igna …] Anton, I keep travelling and travelling but I can’t get to Melikhovo – the cold is so terrible that I dare to beg you (of course, if this letter reaches you) to send something warm for me and Potapenko, who at your request and out of friendship for me will accompany me. Poor man! … At the Ermitage they keep asking why you haven’t been seen there so long. I answer that you are busy writing a play for Iavorskaia’s benefit night.
Potapenko added a postscript, asserting his right to bring Lika to Melikhovo.8 Ivanenko warned Chekhov that Christmas:
Hurry to Moscow and save her from perdition, not me but her. You are awaited like a god. Lika is very fond of white and black beer and a few other things that are her secret and which she will reveal to you.9
Anton did nothing to save Lika, who now understood that she was being handed over. On 27 December cousin Georgi arrived from Taganrog. Pavel had gone to Moscow to attend as many church services as he could. Anton wrote to his editor at Russian Thought, Viktor Goltsev: ‘Potapenko and Lika have just arrived. Potapenko is already singing. But so sadly, you can’t imagine!’ Anton ended: ‘Lika has started singing too.’
Notes
1 See RGALI, 459 1 2161: O. P. Kundasova’s letters to A. S. Suvorin, 1891–1908.
2 See OR, 331 43 11g: N. Ezhov’s letters to Anton, 1893: 16 Apr.
3 That Athenian night was beautiful. The beautiful is unforgettable. Dear poet, if you only knew what a headache …/I await the supreme vice and send you your dowry./My little Sappho. Come at once, urgent. See RGALI, 571 1 1204: Lidia Iavorskaia’s fifty-one letters to Shchepkina-Kupernik, 1893.
4 See OR, 331 64 2: T. L. Shchepkina-Kupernik’s letters to Anton, 1893–1900.
5 See OR, 331 64 34: Lidia Iavorskaia’s letters to Anton, 1893–6.
6 See PSSP, 5, 506: see RGALI, 459 3 12.
7 See LN68, 479–92; Leontiev-Shcheglov’s diary.
8 See OR, 331 56 36a: Potapenko’s letters to Anton, 1893–5. See Perepiska II, 1984, 62–76.
9 See OR, 331 46 1b: Ivanenko’s letters to Anton, 1892–4.
FORTY-TWO
The Women Scatter
January–February 1894
ON NEW YEAR’S DAY 1894, Potapenko and Lika left Melikhovo together: Anton told Suvorin the next day:
I can’t take any more guests. Though there was one pleasant guest – Potapenko, who sang all the time … In the dining room the astronomer [Kundasova] is drinking coffee and laughing hysterically. Ivanenko is with her and in the next room my brother’s wife, and so on.
As guests and relatives left, they were met in Moscow by Pavel, happier that winter in the company of Vania, his ‘positive’ son. Pavel stayed in Moscow until 10 January: in Moscow, not Melikhovo, Aleksandr met his father. The last irksome guest left Melikhovo for Taganrog on Tatiana’s day, 12 January, when Anton reappeared in the city, in the Hotel Louvre, room No. 54, near his sirens. Anton’s brother, Misha, whom Anton made feel unwanted at Melikhovo, decided to leave for good. Despite his work on the estate, Anton was disparaging him for selfishness. (Potapenko also took a dislike to him, calling him ‘enigmatic, like all tax inspectors’.) Misha applied for a transfer from Serpukhov tax office. On 15 February 1894 he went for an interview in Uglich, a northern city where mediæval Tsars had exiled undesirables. Misha was appointed tax inspector in Uglich and left Melikhovo for good on 28 February. His labour at Melikhovo was distilled into a manual for smallholders, The Granary, A Dictionary of Agriculture. A year passed before The Granary was published by Russian Thought. It sold 77 copies in four years.
Anton’s fallow period was over: from 28 December 1893 to the first week of January 1894, Moscow readers had a new instalment of The Island of Sakhalin, and three stories, ‘Big Volodia and Little Volodia’ in the newspaper The Russian Gazette; ‘The Black Monk’ in The Performing Artist, and ‘A Woman’s Kingdom’ in Russian Thought. None of the stories was acclaimed: the editors of ‘Big Volodia and Little Volodia’ took fright at the story’s sexuality and cut it. (Anton gave his French translator, Jules Legras from Bordeaux, the manuscript for a fu
ll version in French.) ‘The Black Monk’ only later became famous – the first Chekhov story to be published in English. Its medical expertise in the study of TB and megalomania is striking, even though its plot is a tragic love story. A brilliant academic marries the daughter of the man who brought him up, and then, mad and sick, deserts her. The story has a Hoffmanesque mix of music (Braga’s elegy) and of the supernatural (the vision of a black monk). But it is as pregnant with political meaning as ‘Ward No. 6’ or The Cherry Orchard, for much of the story centres on a great orchard, which goes to rack and ruin together with the hero. No reader could fail to align the tyrannical gardener, the hero’s father-in-law with autocracy, or the mad hero with rebellion, and Russia with the orchard – an association that would become explicit in The Cherry Orchard. ‘The Black Monk’ ’s publisher, Kumanin, told Shcheglov, however: ‘Very watery and unnatural. But, you know, Chekhov is still a name. It would be awkward not to print it.’
‘A Woman’s Kingdom’ is a new departure: in three episodes set in an iron foundry it sketches the disparity and parallel between the workers’ misery and the desolation of the owner, a young woman. The story shows the influence of Zola and Dostoevsky – Zola in his portrait of an industrial hell, Dostoevsky in the heroine’s disastrous attempt to mete out charity. If Sazonova’s guess in her diary is right, and the heroine is based on Anna Suvorina, then the iron foundry is an allegory of the Suvorin empire. The radicals saw none of this: they felt that Chekhov’s depiction of the foundry was ‘immoral’ and ‘obsessed with detail’, and for the critics ‘The Black Monk’ was too melodramatic a psychiatric case history. Anton was disappointed that his new works aroused muted reactions. In vain Suvorin lobbied for The Island of Sakhalin to be awarded a prize, while Moscow University rejected the work as a thesis that would entitle Chekhov to lecture on social medicine.
Spurned by critics and academics, Anton connived, to say the very least, at being superseded in Lika’s affections too. Olga Kundasova noticed an opportunity to regain Anton’s love and made herself known at the end of January 1894: ‘If you want to behold me at your place, send horses to meet the post-train and collect your mail on Friday 4 [February]. I shall stay the night and then leave for Meshcherskoe. Until we meet beyond the tomb.’ Anton told Suvorin she was mad. She did not come. Although she was still attached to Iakovenko’s hospital, a year passed before she re-entered Anton’s life.
Everyone at Lopasnia and Melikhovo noticed that on 29 January and 22 February Lika Mizinova came and left not with Anton, but with Ignati Potapenko. On Anton’s thirty-fourth birthday, 16 January 1894, and for one last time, on 25 February, she saw Anton without Potapenko. When she and Potapenko left Melikhovo on 31 January they took with them on the sleighs to the station what was to be Anton’s standard consolation present, two puppies from Quinine, who had mated in the kitchen with one of the farm dogs, Catarrh. The closer Potapenko became to Lika, the more Anton lauded him. ‘You are absolutely wrong about Potapenko, there’s not an ounce of deviousness about him,’ he told Suvorin on 10 January. Potapenko and Lika were not deceiving Anton. Potapenko invited ‘Signor Antonio’ to celebrate Tatiana’s day in Moscow and warned Anton: ‘(8 January) … Lika is away travelling, as a consequence of which I am pining, since I am almost head over heels in love with Lika.’ Potapenko was writing frantically to finance his new life. He went on acting as Anton’s agent, collecting royalties, handling manuscripts, even in mid February negotiating with the hard-headed publisher Adolf Marx an advance for a novel that Anton would write by 1895 for the popular monthly journal The Cornfield. On the back of Marx’s letter of agreement, Potapenko wrote to Chekhov:
I told him I thought Chekhov needed to get away to some blissful country but is prevented by worries about family business … Anton, dear boy, go away somewhere to clear skies, to Italy, to Egypt, to Australia, does it matter? It’s vital, for I notice a weariness in you … Forgive my interfering in your life, but I love you almost as I would a girl.
Lika’s letters hinted that Anton could still retrieve her:
I am completely in love with Potapenko! What can we do, daddy! All the same you will always know how to get rid of me and dump me on somebody else! I am sorry for poor Ignati – he had to go such a long way (that is, to Melikhovo) and, worse, talk! Awful! Ask him to forgive you for submitting him to such a punishment for two days.
(22 January) Dear Anton. I have something important to ask you. When I was in Melikhovo I forgot my cross and I feel very bad without it … For God’s sake, tell Aniuta to have a look and then you wear it and bring it to me. You must wear it, or else you will lose it or forget it some other way. Come and see me, uncle, and don’t forget about me. Your Lika??
In Anton’s notes to Lika, on 20 and 21 February, when he, Lika and Potapenko were together in Moscow, a note of regret, even desire creeps in:
Lika, give me your little hand [in Russian ‘ruchka’ also means ‘pen’]; the one I was given smells of herring. I got up a long time ago, I had coffee at Filippov’s. A. Chekhov …
Darling Lika, today at 6.30 p.m. I shall leave for Melikhovo. Would you like to come with me? We’d return together to Moscow on Saturday. If you don’t want to go to Melikhovo, come to the station.
A day after Anton, Lika came to Melikhovo for five days with Potapenko. In the last days of this strange menage Lika conceived a child by Potapenko.
Masha became resentful. She felt angry at what she believed to be Lika’s desertion and Potapenko’s betrayal of Anton; at the same time she envied Lika her passionate love life. Masha made the new couple feel awkward. On 25 January Potapenko and Lika left Melikhovo; the next day Anton followed them to Moscow. Anton and Potapenko stayed with Suvorin in the same apartment. On 27 January, Potapenko left Moscow for Petersburg and Paris, where his second wife was waiting. He made Masha a present of English watercolour paints and a disquisition on how women artists might eventually rival men. Masha was icy. On Tuesday 1 March 1894 Lika appealed to her:
Dear Masha. Take pity on me and come for God’s sake to say goodbye for ever to an unfortunate woman like me. On Saturday evening I am leaving, first for home, and from there straight to Paris. The affair was settled only yesterday … Surely your dressmakers would let you say goodbye to a person whom you used to consider a close friend! No, joking apart, I somehow hope you will want to meet me …1
By 15 March 1894 Lika was in Berlin, on her way to join Potapenko in Paris.
Anton decided to leave the frozen north himself. He made enquiries about a sunny hotel room at Gurzuf, near Yalta in the Crimea, to spend a month recuperating in the warmth, while Masha and Pavel coped with ploughing and sowing. In five days of February spent in Moscow, Anton rejoined a ménage-à-trois with Tania and Lidia Iavorskaia in the Hotel Louvre. He posed for a photograph in which the two women look adoringly at him, while his attention has been caught by the photographer: the picture became known as The Temptations of St Antony. Iavorskaia’s adoration had a price. She wrote on 1 February:
On 18 February I have my benefit night in Moscow … I hope you remember the promise you made to write me at least a one-act play. You told me the plot, it is so entertaining that I am still under its spell and have decided, for some reason, that the play will be called Daydreams.
Anton never wrote a word of Daydreams. Tania, instead, wrote for her a one-act comedy called At the Station. She wanted to present Iavorskaia with a framed blotting-pad – the frame to be engraved with autographs from her admirers. Anton refused to inscribe his name on it. Levitan had offered. ‘Believe in yourself, I. Levitan’, and Anton would not join his old friend, even on a piece of silver.
In February 1894 the managers of the Hotel Louvre and Madrid decided that the comings and goings through the ‘Pyrenees’ brought the hotels more notoriety than profit: Tania and Iavorskaia were asked to leave. By April they were living as lovers in the Vesuvius Hotel in Naples.
On 2 March, after seeing Potapenko off to Petersburg, Anton left for th
e Crimea. He steamed past Melikhovo without stopping at Lopasnia station.
Notes
1 See OR, 331 93 79: Lika Mizinova’s letters to Masha, 1894
VI
Lika Disparue
Ariane, ma sœur, de quel amour blessée Vous mourûtes aux bords où vous fûtes laissée!
Racine, Phèdre
The spirit in which Albertine had left was doubtless like that of peoples who use a demonstration of their armed strength to further the work of their diplomacy.
Proust, Albertine disparue
FORTY-THREE
Abishag cherishes David
March–June 1894
IN MARCH 1894 the Chekhov squadron scattered south and west from Moscow and Melikhovo. On the 4th Anton came ashore at Yalta, storm-tossed but not seasick. Instead of the tiny resort of Gurzuf, he chose Yalta. Settled in a hotel, he had a telegram from Tania and Iavorskaia in Warsaw. Masha wrote on 13 March: ‘I was sad to see Lika off and I miss her very badly. Be well and don’t cough … Mother asks, should she slaughter the bigger pig for Easter?’ Lika Mizinova and her ‘chaperone’ Varia Eberle joined Potapenko in Paris on 16 March: Lika wrote to Anton from Berlin on the 15th:
I shall die soon and shan’t see anything more. Darling, write for old time’s sake and don’t forget that you gave me your word of honour to come to Paris in June. I shall wait for you and if you write, shall come and meet you. You can count on accommodation, meals and all comforts from me: only the travel will cost you anything. Well, till we meet, hurry, till we meet, definitely in Paris. Don’t forget the woman you rejected, [wavy line] L. Mizinova.1
Anton Chekhov Page 37
