Anton Chekhov

by Donald Rayfield

  Chekhov is philosophizing as usual, he’s very pleasant, as usual, but I don’t think he’s well. I said to him, ‘Why don’t you let a doctor take a look at you?’ – ‘It makes no difference, I have five to ten years left to live, whether I consult a doctor or not.’6

  Anton longed to travel, and as far from relatives as he could. Deserted in France, Lika hoped he might keep his promise and come. She wrote to Anton on 14 July a letter which he did not receive until autumn:

  Your pictures are placed all round my room and every day I address them with some warm words which I still haven’t forgotten. Predominantly they begin with the letter S. [swine, sod]. I don’t have the custom of hanging my friends’ pictures where you put them … I’d give 10 years of my life (and I’m thirty [she was 24]) to find myself in Melikhovo. Just for a day. But there’s no chance of coming before winter. Oh what a swine you are not to come and see us. But above all for not stopping me from going to Paris … I should like to have a half-hour chat with you! I think in half an hour you could put some sense into me. Your girl friends Tania and Iavorskaia have finally left Paris. Varia and I are very glad, although in general we kept them away. They were boasting about a letter you wrote them and of course I couldn’t resist the pleasure of compromising you and I told them you write to me every day! So there! Everyone has forgotten me. My last admirer Potapenko has also cunningly deceived me and is running off to Russia. But what a b**** his wife is!

  Just before Anton received this letter, Ignati Potapenko turned up at Melikhovo: the carpenters had just finished the guest cottage. Anton was, according to Vania’s letter to his wife that day, ‘ill, horribly depressed’. On Sunday 17 July Potapenko put his side of the story. He left for Moscow the next day. Masha was indignant, but Anton indulgent. Potapenko told neither that Lika was pregnant.

  Potapenko was now a source of strife between brother and sister: when Anton went to Moscow on 22 July, ostensibly to see Suvorin off to Feodosia, he hid from Masha that he had slept in the same flat as Potapenko. Only in September did Misha let their sister know: ‘Now it’s over, I can confess to an involuntary lie: I did meet Anton and Potapenko in Moscow and my lie was due to the need to hide their secret.’ Anton and Potapenko spent five days with ‘Grand-dad Mikhail Sablin’7, an éminence grise in the lives of Lika, Potapenko and the Chekhov brothers. Sablin told Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik that Potapenko and Anton were staying with him; the news leaked to Lika. Anton said he was in Moscow to see The Island of Sakhalin through the press. In fact, doubting that Suvorin would ever set off for Italy, Anton was planning a journey with Potapenko. He was desperate to travel.

  St George, instead of rescuing the maiden (not having received her last letter), was off with the dragon. Anton returned to Melikhovo for six days and on 2 August left with Potapenko for the Volga. Retracing Anton’s route to Siberia, they took a boat from Iaroslavl to Nizhni, to sail down the Volga to Tsaritsyn [Volgograd], and thence to Taganrog. A fortnight later Anton summed up an idiotic trip to Suvorin:

  In Nizhni we were met by Sergeenko, Lev Tolstoy’s friend [and Potapenko’s]. The heat, the dry wind, the noise of the fair and Sergeenko’s chat suddenly stifled, bored and sickened me, I picked up my suitcase and fled in disgrace … to the station. Potapenko followed. We took the train back to Moscow. But it was embarrassing to return empty-handed, so we decided to go anywhere, Lapland if need be. If it weren’t for his wife [the first Mrs Potapenko], our choice would have been Feodosia, but – alas! in Feodosia we have the wife. We thought, we talked, we counted our money and we went to the Psiol.

  On their way to the Lintvariovs, Anton and Potapenko stopped off at Lopasnia for letters. They went on to Sumy without contacting anyone at Melikhovo. On 14 August they brought Natalia Lintvariova home with them. Potapenko then vanished to Petersburg, where he sorted out his own and Anton’s finances with Suvorin, found himself a typist, and plunged into the literary cesspit.

  Anton’s family now demanded his care. On 9 August a son, Volodia, was born to Vania and Sonia: after a harrowing birth the baby was well, but Sonia was ill. Uncle Mitrofan, at fifty-eight, was dying. In July Anton’s pretext for going to Taganrog had been to examine Uncle Mitrofan, debilitated by three years of illness. Fleeing Sergeenko, Anton had also abandoned Mitrofan. At Melikhovo lay a letter that Mitrofan had dictated to his daughters, addressed to Pavel, asking why Anton had not come:

  Our good Taganrog clergy in all the churches are offering ardent prayers for me in my sickness. My pain is in the left side, in the stomach, sometimes in the head, and my legs are painfully swollen, so that without others’ help I cannot cross the room, I cannot eat, I have no appetite; my left side stops me sleeping, I sit on the bed almost all night, dozing … When you receive the news of my departure to eternity, would you, the only relative in all our family who has loved and considers it a duty to think of one’s kin, for the rest of your life have offertories said for me.

  Christian faith sustained Mitrofan for a month. Anton set off for Taganrog, and stayed not with his uncle but in the best hotel. When Anton appeared at the sickbed, Mitrofan wept with joy and declared he ‘was experiencing unearthly feelings’. Anton spent a week, but could not prescribe anything other than the heart stimulants which the Taganrog doctors were giving. Anton declared that he could have helped if he had been consulted earlier. He resolutely refused to discuss his own illness, let alone take measures to treat it.8 Telling Leikin that the best treatment for eyes was nothing, Anna Suvorina that the boldest treatment for a bad throat was to leave it alone, and advising the singer Miroliubov that to ensure good health one should lie in bed covered from head to toes with a blanket and rub one’s body with tincture of blackcurrant buds, Anton was formulating the facetious approach of Dr Dorn in The Seagull. All that he did for his uncle’s family was to send their elder daughter, the seventeen-year-old Aleksandra, to Moscow to train as couturier. Anton then called on the mayor of Taganrog, and asked him to offer Aleksandra a post of sewing teacher.

  On the eve of Anton’s departure The Taganrog Herald annoyed him:

  Mr Chekhov has been called as a doctor to his seriously ill relative Mitrofan Chekhov, elder of St Michael church. From here the talented writer is setting off to the Crimea, where he has been summoned by Mr Suvorin who has fallen ill and is now living on his estate in Feodosia.

  Chekhov went to the Taganrog Herald office, where an old school friend, Mikhail Psalti, worked, to protest that he was not Suvorin’s doctor. He did not call at Taganrog post office, where Lika’s letter of 14 July (addressed to Potapenko, as a man more likely to collect his mail) had lain all August. Then Anton boarded the train for a two-day journey to Feodosia (the direct sea route was too rough).

  Anton stayed with Suvorin for four days. It was cold in Feodosia: Suvorin had built a magnificent villa with no stoves. The two men set off, via Yalta and Odessa, to western Europe. At Yalta, where plaster copies of Chekhov’s bust were on sale, they dined in the park café. Elena Shavrova, there on her honeymoon, saw them, but was too shaken to speak to Anton.

  Deserted among strangers in Switzerland, Lika longed to be rescued. The family in Melikhovo felt deserted, too. Evgenia was worried about her newborn grandson, and Pavel was distressed by Mitrofan. Masha bore the full weight of running a house in disarray. She complained to Misha:

  This is the third week we have been rebuilding the stoves, relaying the floors … The stove makers get in the carpenters’ way, the carpenters in the painters’ and Papa gets in everybody’s way … Roman asks for two weeks’ leave and he is my only help … Quinine and Brom are howling, they have nowhere to sleep … I’m at the end of my tether, Misha, it really is a terrible amount for one woman to cope with! … I’m also afraid that Anton will be displeased. Never have I felt so much like leaving, throwing up everything, never to come back!9

  Uncle Mitrofan sank into death; his eldest son Georgi gave him water from a teaspoon, while Aunt Liudmila, heavily sedated, wept inconsolably. On 9 August, t
elegrams reached Melikhovo and Yalta: ‘God’s will our dear parent died eighth evening. Chekhovs.’ Pavel grieved. He wrote to Anton, Vania, Aleksandr and Misha, ‘how kind Mitrofan was to everybody … Now I have no friend.’10 (Nobody, however, wrote to Mitrofan’s and Pavel’s sister Aleksandra in Boguchar, nor to any of her children.) Pavel was too busy with building at Melikhovo to attend the funeral in Taganrog. Mitrofan’s requiem, one of Taganrog’s most memorable services, was conducted by Father Pokrovsky and four junior priests. Pavel was sent a handwritten copy of the forty-minute speech that one of the Church Brethren made as Mitrofan was buried within the church precinct. It began:

  Before the grave-digger’s spade has touched the coffin lid to conceal it in the bowels of the earth, so fateful for so many, by the coffin I hasten with a final farewell word for the man who lies within. You have left us, dear Mitrofan, and left us for ever! …11

  Notes

  1 See OR, 331 46 1b: Ivanenko’s letters to Anton, 1892–4.

  2 See LN68, 479–92; Leontiev-Shcheglov’s diary.

  3 See OR, 331 81 13: Pavel’s letters to Aleksandr Chekhov 1874–94: Aug. 1894.

  4 See MXaT, (Sanin), 5323: L. S. Mizinova-Sanina’s letters to Lidia Iurgeneva.

  5 See MXaT, (Sanin), 5323/ 1933–1973: L. S. Mizinova’s letters to Sofia Ioganson, 1877–99.

  6 See IRLI, fond 285, S. I. Smirnova-Sazonova papers.

  7 Sablin’s brother, a tax inspector (died in 1895), protected Misha; Mikhail Sablin, a theatre manager, edited The Russian Gazette. The Sablins and Misha made Masha a monthly allowance, which Anton pretended not to know about.

  8 Chekhov’s library had two books on syphilis, and none on TB, yet Potapenko remembers him telling a consumptive passenger on a train to abandon work and family and live in Algiers.

  9 See RGALI, 2540 1 483: Masha’s letters to Misha, 1884–1904: 7 Aug. 1894.

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

  11 See OR, 331 33 1v: Pavel Chekhov, various documents.

  FORTY-FIVE

  The Birth of Christina

  September–November 1894

  ANTON’S SECOND TOUR of Europe with Suvorin was secret. His family was led to believe he was returning after a short recuperation in Feodosia, but Anton was as naïve as Potapenko in hiding his movements. When he and Suvorin reached Odessa on 13 September and left the next day for Vienna, the newspapers proclaimed their arrival and departure. Odessa’s actors lamented that they would be staging Ivanov without the author. The Odessa authorities refused Anton a foreign passport. Suvorin had to throw his full weight at General Zelenoi, Odessa’s mayor: in the night Zelenoi sent two men to break open the passport office and bring Chekhov’s documents. From Odessa Anton sent consolations to Georgi and his family; he also warned Masha not to expect him home until October (November, he told Mikhail Psalti at The Taganrog Herald) and told her how to save asparagus and tulips from autumn frosts. She was to bring a warm hat to the station when he returned.

  The two men reached Vienna on 18/30 September. Lika meanwhile, seven months pregnant, languished in Switzerland. She had moved from a guest house in Lucerne, where English tourists stared at her, into lodgings at Veytaux, on Lake Geneva. With Anton’s photographs around her room, lonely and afraid, Lika pretended to be a married woman of frail health in an interesting condition. To Granny she wrote that, despite a chill, she was in paradise. She went to the post office daily. In Vienna Anton bought an inkwell and wrote to Paris:

  You obstinately refuse to answer my letters, dear Lika, but I am still annoying and pestering you with my letters … I remember Potapenko telling me you and Varia Eberle would be in Switzerland. If so, write to me where in Switzerland I might find you … I beg you, don’t tell anyone in Russia that I am abroad. I left secretly, like a thief, and Masha thinks I am in Feodosia. If they find out I’m abroad, they will be hurt, for they have long been fed up with my frequent journeys.

  I’m not very well. I have an almost continuous cough. I seem to have lost my health as I lost you.

  Lika did not know where Anton was: two days later she sent a plea to Melikhovo:

  Not a trace of the old Lika is left and I think, and I can’t refrain from saying so, it is all your fault! Anyway, that’s fate, it seems! I’ll say one thing, I have lived through moments I thought I would never live through! I am alone! There is not a soul around me to tell all that I am going through! God forbid anyone should experience anything like this! All this is vague, but I think it will all be clear to you! You are supposed to be a psychologist! Why I am writing all this to you, I don’t know! All I know is that I am writing to nobody but you! And therefore don’t show this letter even to Masha and say nothing! I am in despair: there is no ground beneath one’s feet and one feels somewhere, I don’t know, somewhere very nasty! I don’t know if you will sympathize with me! Since you’re a balanced, calm and rational person! Your whole life is for others and you don’t seem to want a personal life of your own! Write to me, darling, soon! … Your promises to come are all rubbish! You will never move.

  Now Suvorin and Anton were in Abbazia, then a fashionable Adriatic resort under Austrian rule. It rained constantly and, Anton told Natalia Lintvariova: ‘There are crowds of Yids here; they speak Russian.’ To Anton, the only friendly Russian face was that of a wet nurse Anton had once treated. Abbazia reminded Anton of Maupassant’s Mont-Oriol: the journey revived Maupassant’s influence in Chekhov’s work. On 22 September/4 October he and Suvorin fled to Venice. Lika had replied to Anton, but her letter lay in Abbazia post office, before trailing Anton across Italy:

  I warn you, be amazed by nothing! If you don’t fear being disillusioned by your old Lika, then come! There’s no trace of her left! Yes, just six months have turned my life over, not leaving, as they say, a stone standing! Though I don’t think you’ll throw the first stone at me! I believe you’ve always been indifferent to people, their failings and weaknesses! Even if you don’t come (very likely, given your laziness), then keep everything I write a secret between us, uncle! You are not to tell anybody anything, even Masha! … Are you alone! Or with Suvorin? He is the last person to be told about my existence [Suvorin was a notorious gossip] … Potapenko wrote that he might come to Montreux between 25–30 September.

  The letter reached Chekhov in Nice two weeks late. Anton told Masha, ‘Potapenko is a Yid and a swine.’ Lika wrote again: ‘Darling I’m alone, very unhappy. Come alone and don’t talk about me to anybody.’

  By now Anton had Lika’s last three letters; he could be in no doubt that Lika was pregnant. He needed a new excuse not to come to her rescue. He chose to use Suvorin as a pretext. On 2/14 October 1894, the same day that he denounced Potapenko to Masha, he sent Lika a chilly note:

  I can’t go to Switzerland: I’m with Suvorin who has to go to Paris. I’ll spend 5–7 days in Nice, then go to Paris for 3–4 days, then Melikhovo. I’ll be at the Grand Hôtel in Paris. You had no cause to write about my indifference to people. Don’t pine, be cheerful, look after your health. I bow deeply and firmly, firmly shake your hand. Yours A. Chekhov.

  Had I got your letter in Abbazia then I’d have gone via Switzerland to Nice to see you, but now it’s awkward to drag Suvorin along.

  Potapenko too let Lika down: from Petersburg he came for forty-eight hours to Moscow, not to Montreux: he wanted to talk Masha Chekhova round.

  Avoiding Switzerland and Lika, Anton found Europe less thrilling than in 1891. He bought three silk ties, a tiepin and some glass in Venice, and caught nettle rash. In Milan he watched a dramatization of Crime and Punishment: he felt that Russian actors were pigs compared with the Italians – an opinion which boded ill for the play he was germinating. He visited first the cathedral, then the crematorium. In Genoa, Anton and Suvorin strolled around the cemetery, then left for what Maupassant called ‘the flowering cemetery of Europe’, the Côte d’Azur. They spent four days in Nice; here Anton worked on ‘Three Years’, and ‘coughed and coughed and coug
hed’. He felt misanthropic and told Masha to see that she alone met him at the station when he got back. Suvorin, too, was disgruntled. Sazonova noted: ‘A letter from Suvorin in Nice. He and Chekhov are fed up with each other, they are both roaming from place to place and saying nothing.’ Suvorin never forgot a spat with Anton on the Promenade des Anglais. He asked Anton why he no longer wrote for New Times. Anton curtly told him to change the subject, and his ‘eyes flashed’.1 On 6/18 October Anton and Suvorin set off for Paris. They left Paris three days later, just before Lika came down to Paris from the Swiss Alps to seek new lodgings and a midwife.

  After a day in Berlin, Anton arrived in Moscow on 14 October. Autumn rains had made the journey to Melikhovo hazardous, so he stayed there for five days and read proofs. He thanked Masha for her hard work with a ring and a promise of 25 roubles. He sent a note to the Louvre and Madrid hotel, for Tania and Iavorskaia, who, no longer dressed in violet and green, still astounded Moscow’s theatregoers. Anton’s note, on blue card, was in their style: ‘At last the waves have cast the madman ashore … and he stretched his arms to two white seagulls …’ Lidia Iavorskaia responded eagerly:

  Waiting for you is a hot samovar, a glass of vodka, anything you want, and above all, me. Joking apart, please come tomorrow. You will be off to your village and again I shan’t see you for ages. And with you I relax from everybody and everything, my friend, my kind, good man.