Anton Chekhov

by Donald Rayfield

On 19 October nine degrees of frost hardened the mud roads: Anton returned to Melikhovo, where the family had installed new bedroom floors, a well, a flushing lavatory and new stoves, though they could not raise the temperature in the house that freezing autumn above 15°C. Anton was to stay a whole month in Melikhovo, writing and sleeping in the new guest cottage. Pavel, as he put it, ‘moved into His Cell, into the Kingdom of Earth’;2 Franz Schechtel had presented the family with their most valuable possession, an Art-Nouveau mantelpiece. There was one drawback. Anton wrote twice to Masha, who was teaching in Moscow:

  Find out in the shops what the best mouse poison is; the bastards have eaten the wallpaper up to four feet from the floor in the drawing room … If you can’t find mouse poison, bring 1 or 2 mousetraps.

  Soon there was little need for Anton or Masha to leave the estate for Moscow. In mourning for Tsar Alexander III, who died on 20 October, Moscow’s schools and theatres closed. Until the first snow came, in any case, travelling over icy ruts was torture. One journey to a patient nearby made Anton’s ‘innards turn inside out’.

  Lika, in Paris, believed that Anton was still in Nice. Her last letter from Veytaux eventually reached Melikhovo:

  Lika, in the literal sense, very very much wants to see you, despite my fear that if you ever did have a decent opinion of me it will now change when you see me! But all the same, come! I’m sad, darling, infinitely!

  Masha shared Lika’s mood. On 10 October Masha had gone to Moscow for an event so distressing that the 10th became a bad omen for her. On 10 January 1895 she wrote to Tania Shchepkina-Kupernik: ‘a sad event that happened on this very day three months ago makes my mood quite unsuitable for merriment.’3 We do not know what this sad event was: had Masha renounced yet another man? Unhappy, sleepless, she stayed away from Melikhovo until 4 November. She did not meet Tania or Iavorskaia. She was taking cod liver oil and putting a cold compress on her heart. When she came, she brought Ivanenko, because she could not face the train journey alone. To judge by his evasive tact, Anton had an inkling of what was behind her anguish – conceivably, she had been seeing Levitan. Anton told Masha to consult his colleague the neurologist Professor Vasili Shervinsky (‘and take 5 roubles just in case’): he would help her sleep.

  In Moscow Vania, Sonia and the baby Volodia had become a loving trio, closed to outsiders. Misha was unhappy in Uglich, but hoped that his protectors could transfer him to another tax office. Cousin Aliosha Dolzhenko, free of Gavrilov’s warehouse, won Anton’s respect. He was now a violinist in an amateur orchestra. Aleksandr in Petersburg, however, was distressed, even though little Misha, Natalia believed, was ‘something outstanding’. The more affectionate Natalia’s postscripts to Anton, the more Aleksandr disparaged his wife: ‘Natalia gives birth almost every day to whole ribbons of some tapeworm.’ Aleksandr’s unhappiness led to new aberrations. On the night of 12 November 1894 he arrived at Melikhovo with Vania and Ivanenko. The next day a note arrived from Natalia:

  Dear Anton, I beg you to write and tell me if my husband is with you. This strange man left when I was out. I am worn out. Where is he? What’s wrong with him? Please, dear Anton, don’t show him my letter.4

  Aleksandr stayed for the celebrations of Tsar Nicolas II’s marriage. Anton thanked Natalia wryly ‘for letting him come and see me.’

  While Aleksandr took refuge at Melikhovo, his wayward behaviour infected the village. A drunken peasant, Epifan Volkov set fire to the thatched roof of his cottage. Despite Aleksandr’s experience with the fire brigade, the hut burnt down, and Volkov was arrested for arson. Otherwise, Anton had an undisturbed November. Only Elena Shavrova accosted Anton, asking him to return six stories which had vanished in Anton’s absence. Anton denied having them and told her to rewrite them from memory. This, said Shavrova sulkily, was untrue and impossible.

  Prince Shakhovskoi, ruined by debt, had sold his estate of Vaskino to an engineer, Vladimir Semenkovich. The new neighbour seemed at first just a monstrous reactionary,5 and gave Anton no reason to emerge from solitude. A month in Melikhovo relatively free of visitors, in a cottage apart, gave Anton the conditions he needed to write. When he rose from his desk in the cottage, Anton talked only to his inferiors. Occasionally he helped Masha teach the two maids, Aniuta Chufarova and Mashutka, to read and write. (Anton would soon be a governor and builder of schools.) He was kind to Mikhail Plotov, the schoolteacher in the nearby village of Shchegliatevo, and gave him medical advice, a gun, a gundog and tickets to the theatre. The schoolteacher at the village of Talezh, Aleksei Mikhailov, an even needier figure, was also befriended. Grey at thirty, with four children, Mikhailov spoke only of misery on 24 roubles a month.6

  In near solitude, Anton completed the book version of The Island of Sakhalin and the long story he had pondered since 1891, ‘Three Years’. Not since his journey to Sakhalin had he been so absent from literary circles. Viktor Bilibin told Gruzinsky: ‘It’s said in Petersburg that Chekhov has consumption and that the Moscow doctors have given him only a year to live.’7 Russia’s minor writers, fed by Suvorin’s gossip, buzzed with rumours. Gruzinsky told Ezhov, who told Anton: ‘Kindest Anton! … inviting you to my Moscow flat is like sowing semolina and expecting maize to sprout. You are unattainable for us little people. I remain the friend of your youth, now your enemy.’8 Anton responded with enough warmth to persuade Gruzinsky and Ezhov to visit Melikhovo before the winter was over. To Lika he gave not a word of encouragement or comfort.

  Lika was no longer alone in Paris. Potapenko, pocketing more advances, had rushed there. (He told Masha he was in Kherson province by his father’s sickbed.) By early November Potapenko was with the second Mrs Potapenko, on Rue des Mathurins, a couple of miles from Lika. On 9/21 November Lika gave birth to a daughter, whom she named Christina. She coped alone for nine days; she and the baby were both ill. A wet nurse was found. Maria Potapenko offered to bring the baby up as her own. Lika spurned the offer as a ploy to recapture Potapenko. Lika told Masha in February 1895 that Maria Potapenko threatened to kill herself and her own children, and Ignati to shoot just himself.9 While Lika was still prostrate, Potapenko wrote to Anton from Paris, unusually legibly:

  First: keep my location absolutely secret, for that is essential. Secondly, the following: I have got into a tout à fait desperate situation … here I am shivering with cold and other misfortunes. This is hard to understand for a man who is sitting in a warm house in front of a newly constructed fireplace, but an artist must imagine it. The reason I am here is hard to explain, and better left entirely unexplained. But I can neither leave nor pay certain bills … throw off your rural laziness and go to Moscow, take these resources, go to the Crédit Lyonnais (or better Junker’s) and make a telegraphic transfer in my name to 60 rue des Mathurins, Paris, Potapenko … save me, or else I shall be thinking about suicide.

  The next day Potapenko took his leave of Lika. They never met again. On receiving Potapenko’s letter Anton broke his month’s retreat. Over frozen ruts he made his way to Lopasnia and Moscow with Aleksandr and Masha. (Aleksandr was being repatriated to Petersburg and Natalia.) Anton sent no money until he returned to Melikhovo four days later and asked Goltsev at Russian Thought ‘in absolute secrecy’ to borrow 200 roubles and either send them ‘to the prodigal son’, or – which would break the secrecy – ask Suvorin to do so. Potapenko would ask Anton for another 200 roubles in March, but their friendship was suspended. He and Lika were both frozen out of Anton’s charmed circle. Lidia Iavorskaia now tried to fire Anton’s senses.

  Notes

  1 See O semie, 1970, 179.

  2 See A. P. Kuzicheva, E. M. Sakharova, Melikhovskii letopisets, 1995.

  3 See RGALI, 571 1 1137: Masha’s letters to Shchepkina-Kupernik, 1894–1951.

  4 See OR, 331 33 14: Natalia Golden-Chekhova’s letters to Anton, 1888, 1894.

  5 See L. Z. Abramenkova, ‘Sosed Chekhovykh V. N. Semenkovich’ in Chekhoviana: Melikhovskie trudy i dni, 1995, 264–72.

  6 Mikhailov became Medve
denko in The Seagull. In 1895 the peasants called for his dismissal.

  7 Quoted in PSSP, 5, 587.

  8 See OR, 331 43 11d: Nikolai Ezhov’s letters to Anton, 1894–7.

  9 See OR, 331 93 80: Lika’s letters to Masha Chekhova, 1895.

  FORTY-SIX

  O Charudatta!

  December 1894–February 1895

  ‘I FIND OBLIVION in the theatre,’ Lidia Iavorskaia wrote to Tania in December 1894.1 The two had brought bold ventures back from Paris and Antwerp and drew Anton into the whirlpool of their notoriety. Iavorskaia created two ‘courtesan’ roles. She was the laundress whose son becomes Napoleon’s marshal in Sardou’s ‘relentlessly vulgar’ Madame Sans-Gêne, an apt title for Iavorskaia, and she was the courtesan Vasantasena in the Russian première of Poor Charudatta, a Sanskrit drama attributed to King Sudraka. A poor Brahman, Charudatta, helps Vasantasena escape a prince’s wiles: Vasantasena is nearly strangled, Charudatta nearly beheaded, but all ends happily. In winter 1894–5, at the sight of Anton, Iavorskaia, posing as the adoring Vasantasena, would sink to her knees, crying, ‘O worthy Charudatta’. Anton acquiesced in the game.

  The two women had other projects: Chekhov recommended a perfect vehicle for Iavorskaia, Zola’s adulterous and lethal Thérèse Raquin. For Lidia, Tania had translated Edmond Rostand’s parody of Romeo and Juliet, Les Romanesques. She showed the text to Anton at Melikhovo; he made fun of Rostand’s precious style in Tania’s rendering. Anton was at ease in her company, though Tania quarrelled with Anton as often as with Iavorskaia. She accused Anton of prejudice against lesbians, then abjectly apologized. (Anton warned Suvorin that she was underhand.)

  On 2 December snow fell; visitors raced from the station on sledges. Tania came for a fortnight and charmed all Melikhovo. Anton drove the dachshunds to a frenzy with Tania’s sable. When Pavel left for Moscow, he let Tania write up the diary: she parodied it perfectly. Tania went to pray at the monastery with Evgenia; lost in the snow, she was led back by Prince Shakhovskoi’s workman. Laughter rang out all day. On 6 December she was bonded with Anton, as no other woman. They became godfather and godmother of Prince Shakhovskoi’s daughter Natalia: forever Anton was kum (fellow godparent, a significant relationship in Russia) to Tania and she was kumá to him.

  As Anton finished his brooding ‘Three Years’, Tania’s presence cheered him. He wrote notes on the violet or pink paper that Lidia Iavorskaia had brought from Paris. On 18 December, two days after Tania left for Moscow, Anton followed her. Until Christmas Eve, his mother’s name day, he settled into room No. 1 (handy for the W.C.) in the Great Moscow hotel, where he was the favourite of the staff, and worked.

  ‘Three Years’, the ‘novel’, for which Potapenko had negotiated terms with Adolf Marx, the proprietor of The Cornfield, came out in Russian Thought in January and February 1895. The story was, as Anton said to Shavrova and Suvorin, made not of ‘silk’, but of ‘rough cambric’. ‘Three Years’ – after Sakhalin, his longest work since ‘The Duel’ – was disturbingly naturalist and autobiographical in its evocation of the haberdashery firm Laptev and Sons from which the hero breaks free. Laptev, rich and gauche, is not Anton, but his introversion and revulsion against his merchant heritage, his hovering between the ‘blue stocking’ Rassudina and the idle beauty Iulia, and his reaction to a Rubinstein concert and a Levitan painting make Laptev very Chekhovian. The feckless brother-in-law Panaurov reminds one of Potapenko. Olga Kundasova and Lika also infuse the story. ‘Three Years’ is a languid work: Laptev breaks his emotional and class ties slowly. The story seems the prelude to a long Bildungsroman. Critics ignored its poetry, while friends were shocked at the exploitation of Olga Kundasova’s love for Chekhov. Worse autobiographical frankness was to come.

  In The Russian Gazette Chekhov published uplifting Christmas reading, ‘The Senior Gardener’s Story’. Anton had discussed the death penalty in Sakhalin and talked about it when he stayed in the Crimea. In this story the gardener tells of a judge who cannot sentence the murderer of the town’s doctor, for his faith in humanity makes such a murder unbelievable. The censor cut Chekhov’s moral:

  Believing in God is easy. Inquisitors, Biron and Arakcheev [the Russian empire’s cruellest ministers] believed in Him. No, you believe in man! That faith is possible only for the few who understand and feel Christ.

  Christmas was too crowded for comfort at Melikhovo: Dr Kurkin slept in Anton’s bedroom, Vania in his study. Anton skulked in Masha’s room. After Christmas Anton went to a Yuletide party in the ‘violent’ ward of the Meshcherskoe hospital and brought Olga Kundasova back with him to Melikhovo. The following night Pavel groaned all night and in the morning announced that he had just seen Beelzebub. New Year’s eve was muted. Pavel’s diary reads: ‘Masha returned from Sumy. There were no visitors. We didn’t see in the New Year, we went to bed at 10 after supper. Masha got the lucky penny.’

  On the first day of 1895, as the peasants wished the family a happy New Year and received the traditional gallon of vodka, Anton considered his health. He told his cousin Georgi that his cough was so bad he might spend twelve months in Taganrog: could he buy the seaside mansion belonging to Ippolit Tchaikovsky?

  The next day Anton received a summons:

  By their majesties’ command, issued in Moscow 1 January 1895, Literary General and Knight of the Orders of the Sacred Names of Tatiana and Lidia the First and Private of our Personal Escorts Anton Chekhov son of Pavel is allowed until 3 February to rest in all cities of the Empire and Abroad, as long as he sends two deputies and appears at the set time indicated to carry out double duties.2

  On 2 January, while the Chekhovs slept, one of their majesties came. Tania recalled:

  On my way to Melikhovo I dropped in on Levitan who had promised to show me some sketches … The Levitan that met me in his velvet blouse looked like a Velasquez portrait; I was laden with shopping as always when I travelled to Melikhovo. When Levitan realized where I was going he began, as was his habit, uttering lengthy sighs, saying how unhappy he was about their stupid quarrel and how much he wanted to go there as he had used to. ‘What’s stopping you?’ I said.

  After a slight pause, when they arrived, Anton shook Levitan’s hand. They talked as if three years’ silence had never intervened. The next morning, while Anton slept, Roman drove Levitan to the station. Anton found only a note at breakfast: ‘I’m sorry I shan’t see you today. Will you drop in to see me? I am ineffably happy to be here at the Chekhovs’ again. I have come back to what was precious and really has never stopped being precious.’ Tania and Iavorskaia could now see two ardent courtiers together. On 4 January Anton went to the Great Moscow hotel for over two weeks. Evgenia came too: she was off to Petersburg, to see Natalia for the first time since Kolia’s death. The longing to see her first legitimate grandchild had overcome her distaste for her daughter-in-law.

  Anton told Suvorin that he was in Moscow: he would not say why he had neither written nor come. He asked on Tania’s and Iavorskaia’s behalf if Renan’s L’Abbesse de Jouarre or Ibsen’s Little Eyolf pass the censor. In another letter to Suvorin he asserted that Iavorskaia was ‘a very nice woman’. He celebrated Tatiana’s day and his name day. He watched Lidia act Madame Sans-Gêne at Korsh’s theatre. Vasantasena gave Charudatta a rug and more:

  Come immediately, Antosha! We thirst to see you and adore you. That is me writing for Iavorskaia, I just love you. Yours Tania. I am awfully sad parting with you, as if the best part of my heart is being torn out … wrap yourself up in this Tartan rug, it will warm you like my hot kisses … Don’t forget the woman who loves only you. Your Vasantasena … I’m lonely without you … I’m in despair. Come, darling. And there’s no salad. Order some. I kiss you hard, Lidia.

  Anton loved the luxury around Iavorskaia. He wrote to Suvorin that he needed to earn 20,000 roubles a year ‘since I now can’t sleep with a woman unless she wears a silk petticoat.’ In December 1894 Lika offered a more austere affection from Paris:

  I think I’
d give half my life to find myself in Melikhovo, to sit on your divan, talk to you for 10 minutes, have supper and just pretend that this whole year had not happened … I am singing, learning English, getting old and thin! From January I shall study massage too, so as to have some chance of a future … Soon I shall have consumption, so say all who have seen me. Before the end, if you like, I shall bequeath you my diary, from which you can borrow a lot for a humorous story.

  After three months’ silence Lika and Anton were briefly in touch, but never did either mention Lika’s child. It was as if Christina had never been born. On 22 December Lika invited Masha to Paris: ‘You vile girl, you lie when you say you want to see me! You are now involved with all sorts of trash, so how can you remember me?’ Whom she was calling trash was clear from Lika’s letter to Anton on 2 January:

  Well, has Tania settled in Melikhovo and occupied my place on the divan? Is your wedding to Iavorskaia soon? Invite me so that I can stop it by creating a scene in the church … may all heaven’s thunders fall on you if you don’t answer. Your Lika.3

  Olga Kundasova became hyperactive. She no longer held any post. Her friends – Drs Kurkin, Iakovenko and Pavlovskaia, Anton, and Suvorin – financed her; they were worried by her ‘conspiratorial’ journeys around Serpukhov and Moscow, where she engaged biologists and philosophers in debate. She longed to break free of the psychiatric hospital at Meshcherskoe; she blamed Anton for her headaches, fever and ‘unimaginable melancholy’, and showered him with notes. He tried to placate her, but her retort on 12 January 1895 had all the virulence of the fictional Rassudina in ‘Three Years’: ‘I’d like to congratulate in person a fully-qualified little Don Juan like you. I attach a stamp for the reply. Yours. O. Kundasova.’4 Anton endured her reproaches: more were to come. Kundasova recognized that she was ill – ‘dementia primaria to use our terminology. I’m frightened but not desperately so’ – but she believed in the prophylactic effects of travel, sleep, food and talk in Melikhovo. Chekhov contacted Dr Kurkin, who wrote to Dr Iakovenko. They agreed not to give Kundasova enough money to go far from Meshcherskoe (where she believed she was a pioneering psychiatrist, not a patient). Dr Kurkin advised Anton 13 January 1895: ‘You shouldn’t let your “lady friend” out of your sight, for she tends to get entangled in situations from which she cannot disentangle herself.’5